2008

Soon it’ll be 2009. 2008 was unof­fi­cially dubbed “the year of change.” And a lot did change. It was a good year, I think. There’s a lot that I regret. But it’s been fun.

The tuxes-/fireworks-/Zombies (the band, not the inter­net cliché)-themed New Year’s party we’ve been plan­ning and antic­i­pat­ing is most likely not going to entirely suc­ceed. There will prob­a­bly be some guests, and some booze, but the tuxes and the fire­works are look­ing less likely every day.

The weather in Boston and Chicago is dread­ful. Fri­day after­noon I opted to break the bank on an Amtrak ticket to New York instead of tak­ing a bus. It took three and a half hours. It was like magic. A bus that departed New York at 1:00 on Sun­day after­noon, on the other hand, arrived in Boston at 7:30. We crawled behind two snow plows for what felt like two hours of that trip. For­tu­nately I had been tipped off to Bolt Bus, whose buses have two rows of seats removed, giv­ing every row an extra four or so inches of leg room, which sounds triv­ial but is in fact not triv­ial at all.

Logan Air­port was mad­ness at 6am on Mon­day. I boarded my plane fif­teen min­utes before take­off. Jet­Blue is not all it’s cracked up to be. There really isn’t any notice­able addi­tional legroom. The snack selec­tion isn’t as excit­ing as you might expect. And the TVs embed­ded in the head­rests of every seat is an awful idea. Even if yours is off, your eyes are irre­sistibly drawn to every other screen in front of you, all of which are on. This of course requires that all the shades be pulled down to reduce glare. It’s a depress­ing sight that’s ripe for a photo in Adbusters.

If noth­ing else, stay­ing with my folks in Chicago over the hol­i­days slows things down for me and offers me some faint clar­ity and per­spec­tive that I wouldn’t have oth­er­wise. I’m look­ing for­ward to next year. I do feel a lit­tle smarter. I think I even have a bet­ter idea of what I want, and maybe even the moti­va­tion to do some­thing about it.

Any­way. It’s nice to know that there’s a whole week­end between this trip and begin­ning work again.