Getting to Know You

I think I used to write more because I had fewer distractions. It's only when I am done with the video games, done with Twitter, done with Facebook, done with email, done with whatever breathing thing is in the room, that I find myself turning inevitably toward a keyboard. Confronted with nothing, I create. Not to get too Pascal, but I don't think the nothing has changed since I last looked at it. It's always going to be there. It won't get bigger. It won't get smaller. I will just have more or fewer things in my line of sight to block it out sometimes than others. I guess it gets closer. It's always at my time-richest that words come back to my hands. Not having the luxury of immediacy makes for long days. When I do write, it tends to be taken for what it is: existential dread vocalized for yet another new modern era of darkness. I don't know what kind of value it adds to anyone's life, but I seemed to make a few friends who seemed to sympathize with it before drifting away as the years yawned further. I've gotten older. When I was younger, everything happened. It was all there and accessible and part of the narrative, so it was easy to keep it all straight. No plot holes. No lost threads. Tight narrative and gripping drama. But I stopped writing when I got busy. Somewhere between then and now, all of five years between my lowest and my highest point, a lot of things happened that I couldn't pull together anymore. It was like they happened in another lifetime to another character in a spinoff. The canon was a muddled mess because the editors all went out for drinks after the first act and phoned in the second. So the question is, why didn't they tell us? They had to notice. This kind of thing happens without you seeing it but you can't go your whole life without realizing that you eventually lived too long for your brain to figure out who you are anymore. Can you? Did our parents, our teachers, our mentors, our gurus all just decide that it was too dank? Too wretched to tell the youngsters that, "Hey, you know something, I've lived like five of your lifetimes. I have been five times as many people as you are. I have actually forgotten more than you can possibly remember, and it terrifies me."? I used to think it was the alcohol that was making me slip a bit. A few too many nights out blasting brain cells while trying to punish my liver for its (probably) many many sins were probably why it didn't feel quite all like a coherent whole anymore. But then I met more and more old people - they were in short supply in my life, it's an unpleasant story. They drank, or they didn't. They never said it, but I never met one who wasn't doing what I would be doing in their shoes now that I think about it. The secret might well be this. Fifty year old me isn't going to be much different from thirty year old me. I think the reason why is I finally have enough memories that I can pick and choose from what's there to fit the narrative I decide on. I'm no longer constrained by the tyranny of facts and causality preventing me from saying, "Yes, I am a good person." or "I'm an iconoclast." or "I did it my way" or "fuck I am god damned tired of all this shit and let's get a drink already."

I found myself listening to sad songs I hadn't thought about for a long time today at work. Kid Rock was wasted on the redneck rock that he usually performed. Thinking along old maudlin paths and rehashing the previous weekend, I found myself wondering whether and how I simply seem to lack the kind of coping skills for introspection and emotional distress that a functional adult would have. Never in my life, not with strangers, not with my family, not during therapy, not with acquaintances, not with my friends, not with lovers, have I been comfortable answering questions asked after my mental state. Usually this is because up until the question was asked, I had not been thinking of it and was happy not doing so. If I'm lucky some bland socially acceptable response comes to mind before I really process it, otherwise the question startles me into self-examination and makes me uncomfortable. Or if I'm not some upper level manager will ask me how I like the job so far in front of several coworkers and my direct boss and I'll respond with something endearing and confidence-laden like "It's okay so far." I only notice myself feeling sad or angry when it's really built up or when some other external event draws my attention to it. Until I am forced to peer in, I will do everything possible to fend it off. I don't tell stories well, partially because my stories are often boring but also from problems of delivery. It is irritating how I never feel like I'm able to reach the end of a description before I am interrupted. I think it would help if I were more willing to talk about things people could relate to instead of sanitizing it all before it comes out. I should know better by now from spending time around other people who don't die when they talk about themselves that little harm will come to me and likely great rewards. But it could be that I'm not all that bad and really everyone else is the same way. I have established to myself that I get a lot more emotionally unstable (read: more likely to tear up or outright cry at things) when I haven't been getting much sleep, and sleep was in short supply the last few days. So maybe I am blowing up the problem of being an awkward person who doesn't like to feel like he's drawing attention to himself into something more damning all because I need a nap. This year did mark the first time that I felt okay about simply not bothering to talk to every person I recognized. Some because I couldn't remember them all that well, and satisfyingly, others because they were assholes and there was no good reason to associate with them. Reconnecting with folks I hadn't seen in at least a year and spending time with them was the flip side of my thoughts today. I felt good around those people and felt more animated and clever than I have in some time. So I know I can be better than I am usually and was at other times in the same day. The hope is that what you see before you is some kind of step toward that.

I like to use role playing games to work through ideas or issues that are on my mind at the time when I make a character. Per my recent post about death and my growing fear of it, I decided that my character in Ars Magica (adventures of wizards set in Europe of the 1200s, with an otherwise consistent history: that makes this game science fiction, by the by) should be a necromancer driven by a desire to extend his life beyond the normal bounds because the typical wizard ways of doing this do not work for him. We had our first session last night and I realized that I had no idea how to play the character as he was. Just now it came to me; he is my father. In less charitable moods, I have opined that he had an overpowering fear of death which drove him to his 'faith'. Seeing as how it dovetails so well with that post, I think I should go with it. My father's fear of death made his early death more tragic, in a dramatic sense (not ironic, because that's not what the word means). I am not sure where this will take me and I don't have time at the moment to give this a longer treatment, but I wanted to put it down now so it can percolate in the background for the next few days.

Those last drops are often bitter. They are accompanied by the usual suspects: regret, anger, and the sense that forgetting this feeling is Pascal-ian diversion.

What is the role of dissent in society? How can it be reconciled to the ultimate necessity of legitimacy that a political institution requires?

Is it possible to move beyond the seeming end point where personal inclinations have dug in so strongly? I struggle to find a way to accept how wrong things are in the face of what seem to be obvious solutions. "Nothing learned, and everything forgotten." "The lesson of history is that humanity learns nothing from history." To believe one's own solutions are obviously the right path is almost always the surest sign that one is drastically wrong. But Mr. Dawkins, what if you're _right_? Can there be a point where building consensus is not a viable option? History, as far as I know, does not bear that out. We are political animals. We need consensus. No political insurgency succeeds (generally) by being simply principled. Success comes about when smaller groups bring larger groups into a conflict on the side of the smaller group. So the only way in which we can justify non-consensus building is when there is no chance that a larger (ie more powerful) group can be persuaded to agree with your smaller group's position. How does one determine this? If one can, does that mean the position is untenable and it is time to give up, or is martyrdom excusable then? As the received wisdom says on the subject, dying for a cause is easy. There seems to be room for dying for the cause somewhere in the spectrum, but as it stands it must be considered a special case. Why must the true believer be required to accept less than the true expression of their belief? As always we are drawn to the conflict between religion and society, where a society which means to preserve itself must react to religious movements that subvert the authority of the government's sovereignty. A functional society cannot tolerate true believers. Whether the suicide bombers are Christian or otherwise, belief in the state and/or the goals of the state has to come before goals of a religious movement in the mind of a member of society or conflict will result. Given the ultimate stakes on the line that religion represents, we must expect that those beliefs will come into violent conflict with any system that is not that religion (else they would not be different systems).

The conflict lies in being able to know with any kind of certainty whether position X or position Y is the correct one. Certainty, i.e., belief, is a prerequisite for action. I reject utterly the claim that belief in 'science' (rational beliefs tested by experiment) is the same as
'belief' in anything else. It is a misrepresentation of the world as it is experienced and a disingenuous move toward non-constructive nihilism (as opposed to general nihilism, which is unassailable in my opinion but has no input on this particular subject whereas non-constructive forms are attempts at diversion through sophistry when the argument seems lost) to say that empirically testable claims are somehow the same as untestable claims. If we want to throw out all ideas of causality, then we may as well declare victory right now for whatever idea we favor (perhaps unsurprisingly this is something we do frequently) and be done with the effort. Ergo, if your goal is merely to destroy certainty as the last resort to prevent your own error from being drawn into the spotlight, then you are wrong by default. We must accept conventional human limitations as a necessary stop on the way toward truth, but that doesn't mean we must exit the highway at the truck stop of non-being.

Death and a theory of the soul

Maybe it's just a matter of the long hours I have started to spend at work, but I'm starting to feel like I've lost track of some core element of myself. It's been slow in developing, so it could even be something more akin to "this is what getting older feels like". The feeling hovered over my shoulder for the last two weeks; it's only tonight that I feel some notion as to what it is.

This summer I realized that it had been four years since I had graduated from college. Just as much of my life had passed in a world that wasn't what I considered truly formative years as had passed while I was in them. Then I had no idea what I was doing and wasn't particularly inclined to figure it out. I got by. But I did make mistakes, and those led to more. From there it's easy enough to track that downward spiral to my own little brush with falling between the cracks. Recovering from that has taken me nearly three years, and that's not really finished yet.

Was it then? Did I lose it back there, and get by on animal instinct for years only to discover it when I finally have some room to breathe again? It's possible that it has gone on longer than that.

What is it? This feeling may have begun with a shockingly morbid conversation with coworkers right about two weeks ago. I found myself disturbed for a day or two afterward, and that kind of thought process could have worked itself into my background processing. We talked about death. We talked about ideal circumstances in which to die. We considered many forms of suicide out loud and theoretically, trying to discover what would be best. It shouldn't be hard for you to imagine then, that that should be a disturbing topic to ponder. Or maybe it is; I seem to have plenty of friends and acquaintances who will say that they don't fear death. They tell me they like to sleep. I find myself staying up a little later that night.

So it was two weeks ago or so, and I was thinking about death. I think I can say for sure that it was the first time I really felt the weight of my own mortality press on me. In the past I have felt myself aware of my non-immortality, but I have never really considered my own death so directly and with such certainty. Imagining how to angle one's head to ensure "instantaneous" loss of nerve function after going skydiving and purposefully not pulling the chute took up a big part of my thinking. Is it different from falling asleep? I think I believe that life is a series of moments of consciousness given a kind of continuity by our memory and ability to abstract the existence of a future from it. So long as severe pain is avoided...

Being uploaded digitally has been mentioned as a kind of immortality to me before. It doesn't comfort me much to know that some digital construct of me will continue after my meat body perishes, no matter how exactly it mimics it. The self of memory succession born from consciousness will die some day, regardless, and I am it and will die then. The other me that isn't me will continue and remember up to whatever save state my 'brain' was in at the time. Sleeping is similar, however. Again, the problem there is the bump in the road. I go to sleep tonight and my body wakes up tomorrow and it as if tonight's me has died and tomorrow's me has been born. But the succession of memories for the body is me, not the memories themselves. Those can be put anywhere. Once the body dies, the succession stops and that's it. Yoda (and I instantly lose all credibility now that I have brought in a Star Wars quote) is profound when he says "Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter." He has managed to say exactly the opposite of the truth. The matter is the matter; we are our bodies. To say otherwise is to have some other conception of what life is than the succession theory I am purporting here.

That succession has to be in the same place. If it branches along the way, then it's an entirely new being being born. One branch is still stuck on its own path toward oblivion and that grouping of successions can't go somewhere else. Coming to that conclusion as part of the discussion of ideal death circumstances was not only the imposition but the execution of a death sentence. I am going to die. That's heavy stuff for a Tuesday evening when you went downstairs with some coworkers to enjoy a beer or four.

One of the benefits I have routinely found from the process of writing is the way I do end up discovering things. For example, when I started writing this, I legitimately was wondering to myself what I was feeling and why. It was as I was writing that I dredged up this memory and tried working it over a bit. I had thought some of those things at the time, but I had not set them to words and organized them until now. The shift of tone as I ask questions and arrive at statements should corroborate my story here, in case you think I am trying to unreliable narrator you.

Speaking of which, I have concluded that thoughts of death have colored my thoughts lately. But how does that answer my question? Is a realization of the certainty of death

I saw him die. I watched. I kept my eyes open and commanded that they absorb what was in front of me. It wasn't long after I came close to bottoming out or dying myself, about five months. I had been so wrapped up in getting my shit together, so wrapped up in not paying attention to the increasingly worrying signals from my sister and my father's sister that things were bad for him, so wrapped up still in running away from all the things I didn't want to deal with after I had to leave school. Getting by was good enough as long as I didn't think too much. Hearing my aunt or my sister talk about him was good enough if I didn't listen. I wasn't ready for him to die. He had so much to answer for, and I owed him answers as well. He asked me why I had abandoned him and I didn't even know the answer. I wanted to tell him everything. I wanted him to know who I was and I wanted to know who he was. Instead I got years of estrangement followed by a sudden deathbed phone call. Looking back on it is as if he died then after that phone call, and not when I was there watching his breathing slow and hearing why it's called a death rattle. He wasn't really conscious by the time I got to that hospital

I left the room. I ran away from him when he was dying - not even hours before he died. There were so many people there I didn't know and didn't trust. I didn't know why they were there. I wanted to see him alone before he died but I didn't get the chance with all those vultures roosting there in his room. It wouldn't have been productive - he wasn't really conscious at that point and couldn't really talk. In my head I imagined I would be there for a few days and that there would be time to sit in the room alone with him and just talk at him. Instead he died right then, in the same afternoon that I flew in after a storm delay in Chicago. Even on the day he died, I was running away, and he was dying too quickly.

I had to settle for his corpse and not his succession of memories. It was only then that I got to be alone with him, father and son. Only after he died that the rest of those onlookers would clear the damn room. They probably knew he wasn't going to make it. I hadn't let myself think that. His flesh was cool to the touch at that point. I thought about punching him, hard. The variety of things sticking out of his torso made my imagined body blow seem likely to be messy though, and other locations didn't offer the same visceral sensation. I settled for settling my hand on his head. I don't remember now which one. I apologized for not knowing how to answer his last question, and for taking his son away from him. I was struck at the time that my own feeling of a lack of a father was probably a feeling he had reciprocated toward me and I felt selfish and small for being so spiteful. I cried again. I tried not to take too long because others were waiting, either for their turn or to leave.

Part of the attraction to me of writing is being able to practice my l'esprit de l'escalier, to act as if I could go back and replace my fumbling and missed steps with the most economical of phrases and assured actions. I wasn't able then to say what I needed to say, and even now I am only just beginning to get to a point where I feel like I know a rough outline of what I would have preferred to say. I've said that I liked the idea of an owe list, and now I see that it's both a matter of owing to something else and a matter of owing myself a better response to the things that I think are important than I think I gave. I owed him an answer as much as I owed myself the memory of answering.

Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man by Susan Faludi

Some key excerpts that I want to keep around for later from the book.

These are the final two paragraphs of the book.

'Social responsibility is not the special province of masculinity; it's the lifelong work of all citizens in a community where people are knit together by meaningful and mutual concerns. But if husbanding society is not the exclusive calling of "husbands," all the better for men's future. Because as men struggle to free themselves from their crisis, their task is not, in the end, to figure out how to be masculine - rather, their masculinity lies in figuring out how to be human. The men who worked at the Long Beach Naval Shipyard didn't come there and learn their crafts as riggers, welders, and boilermakers to be masculine; they were seeking something worthwhile to do. Their sense of their own manhood flowed out of their utility in a society, not the other way around. Conceiving of masculinity as something to be turns manliness into a detachable entity, at which point it instantly becomes ornamental, and about as innately "masculine" as fake eyelashes are inherently "feminine." Michael Bernhardt was one man who came to understand this in his difficult years after he returned from Vietnam. "All these years I was trying to be all these stereotypes" of manhood, he said, "and what was the use?... I'm beginning to think now of not even defining it anymore. I'm beginning to think now just in terms of people."From this discovery follow others, like the knowledge that he no longer has to live by the "scorecard" his nation handed him. He can begin to conceive of other ways of being "human," and hence, of being a man.

And so with the mystery of men's nonrebellion comes the glimmer of an opening, an opportunity for men to forge a rebellion commensurate with women's and, in the course of it, to create a new paradigm for human progress that will open doors for both sexes. That was, and continues to be, feminism's dream, to create a freer, more humane world. Feminists have pursued it, particularly in the last two centuries, with great determination and passion. In the end, though, it will remain a dream without the strength and courage of men who are today faced with a historic opportunity: to learn to wage a battle against no enemy, to own a frontier of human liberty, to act in the service of a brotherhood that includes us all.'

Also from the last chapter, but close to the beginning:

'...From the start, I intended to talk to the men in this book about such matters as work, sports, marriage, religion, war, and entertainment.I didn't go to them originally to ask about their fathers. But they insisted that I do so. Over and over, the breakdown of loyalty in the public domain brought my male guides face-to-face with the collapse of some personal patrimony. Behind all the public double crosses, they sense, lay their fathers' desertion.

This connection between the public and the paternal betrayals sensed more than reasoned. The men I came to know talked about their fathers' failures in the most private and pesonal terms, pointing inevitably to small daily letdowns that were their most visible disappointments: "My father didn't teach me how to throw a ball" or "My father never cam to my Little League games" or "My father was always at work." That they had felt neglected as boys in the home, that their fathers had emotionally or even literally abandoned the family circle, was painful enough. But they suspected that in some way hard to grasp, much less describe, their fathers had deserted them in the public realm, too. "My father never taught me how to be a man" was the refrain I heard over and over again. "I was not guided by my father," Jack Schat, from the domestic-violence group, said to me once, his voice full of anguish. Having a father was supposed to mean having an older man show you how the world worked and how to find your place in it. Down the generations, the father wasn't simply a good sport who played backyard catch, took his son to ball games, or paid for his education. He was a human bridge connecting the boy to an adult life of public engagement and responsibility. That was why shipyard worker Ernie McBride, Jr. took me to meet his father: Ernie McBride, Sr., had taught him "how to be a man," not by playing sports or brining home a paycheck, but by leading a meaningful life - by being the kind of man who would struggle against racism at a shipyard union local, a neighborhood grocery store, a public school; by being a man whose actions mattered to a society he cared about.

For centuries, of course, fathers have disappointed, neglected, abused, abandoned their sons. But there was something particularly unexpected, and so particularly disturbing, about the nature of the paternal desertion that unfolded in the years after World War II, precisely because it coincided with a period of unprecedented abundance. In the generation before the war, millions of fathers failed to support their families, and hordes of them abandoned their households, became itinerant laborers, hoboes, winos. But that was the fault of the Great Depression, not of the men. By contrast, the post-World War II era was the moment of America's great bounty and ascendance, when the nation and thus its fathers were said to own the world. Never, or so their sons were told, did fathers have so much to pass on as at the peak of the American Century. And conversely, never was there such a burden on the sons to learn how to run a world they would inherit. Yet the fathers, with all the force of fresh victory and moral virtue behind them, seemingly unfettered in their paternal power and authority, failed to pass the mantle, the knowledge, all that power and authority, on to their sons.

If only the fathers could have explained why. Because the men I got to know could have borne even their fathers' failure to bestow a legacy, ; they could have weathered the disappointment of a broken patrimony. What undid them was their fathers' silence. The sons grew up with fathers who so often seemed spectral, there and yet not there, "heads" of household strangely disconnected from the familial body. The nonpresent presence of paternal ghosts haunted long after the sons had left home, made families of their own. An aching sadness remained. Men spoke to me of waiting, year after year, for a sign, a late-night confidence, a death-bed confession, even - desperately - a letter delivered posthumously, for any moment that would decode the mystery of their mute fathers. "My dad was real quiet," Dennie Elliott, of the Glendora Promise Keepers, said to me one afternoon, his voice more mournful than bitter. "You could sit in a room and if he said a dozen words in an afternoon, you were lucky. We'd always say, 'Wonder what Dad's thinking?'" Dennie would never find out. "In all the time I knew my father, he only me, 'Always be good at what you do,' and 'Don't be later - always be on time.'"

As I was finishing this book, a new novel by sociologist and former antiwar activist Todd Gitlin arrived in the mail. When I had talked to Gitlin many months earlier, he had told me he was working on a father-son story that he thought might be of interest. Sacrifice turned out to be the tale of an adult son whose inexplicable and estranged father has just died, having either jumped or fallen in front of a subway train, the son doesn't know which. The father has left him an inheritance of sorts: a stack of diaries from "the abandonment years," in which he has inscribed, sometimes moment by moment, his innermost thoughts, yearnings, secrets. "He thought these materials were yours by right," the father's attorney tells the grown son. "He wanted you to have them." And the emotionally starved son devours them, not wanting the words to end. "Father, say more," he appeals to the dust-covered books, "I can take it." The novel is the eloquent, mature reprise of a boy's fantasy, a fantasy shared by so many grown postwar sons: that salvation may come through paternal speech, by a father's silence broken at last.

That layer of paternal betrayal felt, for many of the men I spent time with, like the innermost core, the artichoke's bitter heart. The fathers had made them a promise, and then had not made good on it. They had lied. The world they had promised had never been delivered. But some of the men fathomed that there was yet one more level within, a betrayal deeper than that of personal or public male elders. It was a betrayal so all-encompassing that, as a few men understood, it could hardly be blamed on the fathers. Its tsunami force had swamped the fathers as well as the sons. Its surge had washed all the men of the American Century into a swirling ocean of larger-than-life, ever-transmitting images in which usefulness to society meant less and less and celebrityhood ever more, where even one's appearance proved an unstable currency. It wasn't that real work had disappeared or that men weren't still doing it, and it wasn't that men were no longer needed in their communities. But now even the most traditional of craftsmen and community builders lived in a world where personal worth was judged in ornamental terms: Were they "sexy"? Were they "known"? Had they "won"?

2011 - Postmortem

1. What did you do in 2011 that you'd never done before?

I got into Mint, the online budgeting tool, and was really diligent about getting everything - spending and income and every account that the website could connect to - on it. In the last two months I started keeping track of my cash transactions as I got annoyed at the paucity of data I had about my cash transactions.

I went to Bonnaroo. I have been to few concerts I think, relative to most folks in my age cohort, and I think zero music festival type events up until then. It was punishingly hot from 8 am until 9 pm, and all the best acts were after 7 pm until about 3 am, so I got very little sleep for those four/five days in mid June. I would love to go again.

Thanks to the efforts of Nick and his posse out of Georgia Tech, I went as part of an awesome group of people to the Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle, something I had wanted to attend very badly for years when I was younger. I was a little too old and out of the video game scene for it to be the true extravaganza my youthful self envisioned, and the logistics of a big group of people with rather diverse agendas for the trip made things a little trying at times, but the overall experience was fun and seeing all the goofy stuff I had only seen in old photos from E3s of bygone days in person was a treat.

My middle school self may have this over me, but I spent a lot more time at the public libraries this year than I think I ever have before.

As a result of above, I have read a lot more non-fiction books this year without their having been assigned reading for a class than I ever have before. It turns out that there is actually stuff that's interesting to read in them if you look at the right ones.

Others (this is getting long):
-learned how to do some basic coding in a few software languages
-used my ability to program code to solve problems
-bought a membership in Capital BikeShare
-biked more miles than ever before
-bought a smartphone and paid for my own cell phone plan
-took a college class not at my alma mater
-paid more for a gym membership in one year than I probably thought I would spend in three

2. Did you keep your New Years' resolutions, and will you make more for next year?

I don't really make New Year's resolutions, on the grounds that they are practically by definition the kinds of things we all say we should do and then promptly stop doing. I like to use the end of the year and the start of the new as a time to reflect and to adjust, hence grabbing these questions and using them to fuel this post. I really hate to resolve to do things when I am pretty sure I won't do actually do them (why wouldn't you just do them then??). I can say that I have made incremental changes in my lifestyle over the course of this year, that I plan to continue incrementing these changes, and that I believe this approach is the best way to affect change in my behavior.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth? .

I don't think so.

4. Did anyone close to you die?

My mother's sister died this year, in August. Julie was younger than my mother and died due to breast cancer. I feel bad about it, but this is kind of a stretch because I hadn't been very close with her in recent years. Of all my mother's side of the family, I knew her best and I still use the socks she made for me to keep my feet warm at night during winter.

5. What countries did you visit?

U-S-A! U-S-A! Honestly, I kind of want to count the Chattanooga area of Tennessee.

6. What would you like to have in 2012 that you lacked in 2011?

Job security, more restraint in my at times prodigal spending habits, more expertise in programming, a voice in America's government (Alan Grayson for Congress!), something at least resembling a healthy romantic relationship, less adipose body tissue, fewer useless material possessions

7. What date from 2011 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?

Dates don't tend to stick well with me, but seeing Buffalo Springfield perform at Bonnaroo was amazing. I didn't know who they were coming in to the show, but I dimly remember knowing they were the artists behind "there's something happening here / and what it is ain't exactly clear" in years prior. They rocked! The final number, "Keep on Rocking in the Free World" is definitely etched in my memory and cemented them as my favorite act at the festival.

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?

Eliminating a significant portion of my credit card debt. The peace of mind I gained from knowing that I don't have a bunch of maxed out cards to pay off now is almost worth more to me than the money I am saving not paying usurious interest rates.

9. What was your biggest failure?

Oh, so many choices! Not restraining my spend-happy self more this year meant the difference between 'significant portion' and 'all' of my credit card debt. Not working harder at learning to code while at work. Consequently not getting any FTE offers and remaining a contractor. Numerous disappointments inflicted on those who care about me.

10. Did you suffer from illness or injury?

I crashed into a large potted plant happened to fall while riding a bike I had checked out. Thankfully I was wearing a helmet (something I usually do but really that should be always) and all I did was scuff up my elbows and knees a little. No particular illnesses laid me low in my recollection - which is good because I am allotted neither vacation nor sick days in my current job.

11. What was the best thing you bought?

I am very slightly inclined to say my membership with BikeShare has been the highest net gain, but that would be a lie. I was advised by a very intelligent coworker that the utility for the best thing I bought was very high, and he was right. Having a smartphone is amazingly useful, especially when you don't have a functional computer at home.

12. Whose behavior merited celebration?

Nick, for his patience and for his dogged determination to be a good friend and a better person. My sister, who has had to work hard to rebuild her life in the last three years. My mother, who had a miserable last three years but hopefully will never endure such a cluster of nasty shocks ever again. I would say me ditto, but I feel like I lucked into what I needed to rebuild more than I worked for it. Not that I didn't have some tight calls along the way, but those were a few years ago. It's been a tough few years for the three of us though and it makes me happy that we seem to be making it.

13. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?

Other than mine? One person managed, but the details aren't something I'm going into here.

14. Where did most of your money go?

According to Mint: "Food & Dining". That's right folks. I spent more on food in a year than I did on rent, and it's embarrassingly not even close. Granted, 'food' includes my budget for booze, so it wasn't all food...

15. What did you get really, really, really, really excited about?

PAX - it combined my love of video games, flying on Virgin America, being in the Pacific Northwest, and being in the company of excellent people.

16. What song will always remind you of 2011?

Despite the etching of the aforementioned "Keep on Rocking in the Free World", the honor goes to "The Suburbs" by the Arcade Fire (also heard live at Bonnaroo).

17. Compared to this time last year, are you:
1. happier or sadder? Happier
2. thinner or fatter? Thinner (I think)
3. richer or poorer? Richer

18. What do you wish you'd done more of?

Saving, learning, reading, working out, building things for others

19. What do you wish you'd done less of?

Pretending that I could keep letting things go on the way they were, being selfish

20. How will you be spending Christmas?

I'm guessing that these questions assume I am answering prior to Christmas of 2011... whoops. I spent Christmas at a coworker's place. It was odd being around such a multigenerational group and not having any of them be related to me. The closest approximation is a wedding, but weddings are -thankfully- a lot sexier than this was. The food was good and it was a healthier way to spend Christmas than I did in 2010 (alone and at a terrible bar - not terrible in a good way like a dive bar, just a normal bar so shitty that you wish you had gone to a dive bar; never go to Town Tavern in Adams Morgan).

21. Who did you spend the most time on the phone with?

Probably my mother? I don't spend much time on the phone with folks.

22. Did you fall in love in 2011?

I met a dreamboat of a girl in the fall one awesome night that I have never found again, despite repeated attempts (note to self: next time you meet a girl like that, it doesn't matter if she has a boyfriend, get her number).

23. How many one-night stands?

One and a very frustrating half

24. What was your favorite TV program?

The Wire! Oh wow. I started watching it during the Thanksgiving weekend and have been watching DVDs from the library when I can find the disc with the next episodes; the DCPL system has many virtues, but their hold system for DVDs does not work for TV shows - they need to give the different numbered discs different call numbers.

25. Do you hate anyone now that you didn't hate this time last year?

No one I know personally. I tend to reserve hate for very awful things or people. Chris Dodd, maybe.

26. What was the best book you read?

Tough call this year. Because I'm still reading it and I can't decide between all the other candidates, I will say Stiffed by Susan Faludi. I didn't expect to get grabbed so strongly by it, but she lead with labor unions being shuttered in favor of defense contractors and I was hooked.

27. What was your greatest musical discovery?

Willful misinterpretation: there's a song called "No Return" by a rapper who goes by Canibus. FOR YEARS, this song eluded me. It was on a mix CD that a former roommate found in a gym, so neither of us knew what was on it, but it was a great collection of hip-hop and I particularly liked the chorus for this one. My poor ability to decipher lyrics made it hard for me to find out what the song was, and my former roommate's and my own forgetfulness meant that I kept forgetting that I really wanted to know what the hell this song was. Anyway, this year I had my handy smartphone with me when the song came on, so I looked up a block of text via Google hoping to match with a lyrics site. Little did I know that this was only the beginning (but we are about halfway). Now, the thing I really liked about the song was the beat and the chorus, but I couldn't figure out what the chorus was. I attributed it to bad hearing all this time, so I was happy to find the song name so I could find out what the chorus was. But the lyrics site just said . Infuriated, I checked more sites. ALL OF THEM DID THE SAME THING. Enough coincidence of no one knowing what the words were convinced me that enemy action, not my incompetence, was the culprit though. So I kept digging and eventually discovered that the chorus was actually a traditional Hebrew song! Sadly, the translation revealed that the chorus didn't match up very well with the verses and significantly lowered my opinion of the artist and the song... but that was definitely a great musical discovery I made. If you look the song up on Rap Genius, I'm the one who put in the explanation about it.

28. What did you want and get?

A smartphone, bikeshare membership, a few video games that I don't have time to play

29. What did you want and not get?

A non-contractor version of being employed at the place I work now, respect, honesty

30. What was your favorite film of this year?

Honestly I didn't watch many movies this year. I did catch the new Star Trek movie I guess. It was good - which probably makes it the best Star Trek movie ever made - but I am kind of unwilling to say that was my favorite on the grounds that I must have seen _something_ better than that this year.

31. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?

On my literal birthday, a Thursday, I bought and lugged an enormous charcoal grill from Logan Circle in Washington DC almost all the way to a friend's house in Crystal City Virginia with nothing but my hands and the Metro. Once I got there I used my bikeshare membership to get a bike and use it as a makeshift cart because I despaired of my exhausted muscles being able to haul the thing the rest of the way to my friend's house. As I struggled to keep the enormous box perched precariously on the bicycle, a gorgeous woman 1) laughed at me 2) and then offered to help. She helped me cart it to her nearby home and drove it and me the rest of the way. Then she doggedly got past my initial polite 'no further help necessary' and drove me to the nearby grocery store where I wanted to gather supplies for my planned party that Saturday. Naturally, I asked for her number and invited her to attend. Sadly, she did not attend and did not reply to subsequent texts. I turned 27. The party itself was the following Saturday. It was not quite the soiree that 26 was, but I will count myself a very lucky man if I ever manage to throw a party that I feel goes at least that well ever again. It was similar to the last one in the sense that I had a lot of help from last minute conscriptions of good friends that made it possible. I owe it to my friends to put more planning into this year's party (actually, consider that a resolution for the year).

32. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?

Getting hired by my current indirect employer

33. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2011?

Stretching the limits of how long one can continue to wear the same 'business' clothes (I really need to start replacing that part of my wardrobe).

34. What kept you sane?

Having good friends, and having oodles of money compared to prior years

35. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?

I don't spend a lot of time lusting after celebrity and public "figures", but I suppose this year I noticed Kim Kardashian for the first time. It probably was because of all the TVs on the cardio machines at my gym. Invariably one of them was tuned to the E! channel, which really should be renamed The Kardashian Channel.

36. What political issue stirred you the most?

The illegal assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki by Presidential fiat without judicial review or any public evidence of any crime. The debt ceiling nonsense and repeated government shutdown brinksmanship would have won most other years, but that's the very definition of tyranny and it sickens me that it barely moved the needle of public opinion.

37. Who did you miss?

Old loves, new ones, no one that I swung at (no one)

38. Who was the best new person you met?

Quite possibly Matilda

39. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2011:

Poisoned wells might not kill you immediately, but they will if you don't cleanse the source or stop drinking from them.

40. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year:

Sometimes I can't believe it / I'm moving past the feeling