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A poor excuse at an end-of-year wrapup

I’ve come to hate writing any kind of end-of-year bullshit on here. There is no possibility of me writing a favorite music of 2007 list, as I think I bought three CDs this year. I bought almost no DVDs, and pretty much every movie in the theaters in 2007 sucked total shit. (I actually liked The Darjeeling Limited a lot, but the one major downside to leaving NY is that it’s impossible to catch these limited release movies until they hit NetFlix. I just found one of those arthouse theaters though, so that gives me hope.) I spent a lot of 2007 trying to get rid of stuff, so a list of new posessions to hang around my neck is a bit redundant.

I could talk about books; I read a lot this year, but I didn’t buy many books at all, so there were a lot of rereads. Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke was by far the best thing I’ve read in a while.  Stasiland by Anna Funder took a nice look at the brighter side of communism, and what it was like to live in a country where centralization broke down every aspect of life, as did the East German’s secret police of having something like one in four citizens on the payroll as narcs. John Sheppard’s Small Town Punk came out, albeit edited like Sherman’s troops ‘edited’ the south at the end of the Civil War. I went back and re-read the iUniverse version, and went through his next book a couple of times over the summer.

A lot of shit happened in 2007, to put it mildly. I moved to Denver. I got engaged. I got married. I left my job of six years, and started a new one. We bought two cars. We adopted two cats. I saw about 20 baseball games, including a World Series. (We lost, and I’m still bitter, but at least it’s not like we lost to the White Sox or something.) I went to like 863 doctors this year. (See videos of my knee MRI here and here.) I went to my land twice. I didn’t go to any new states, but I went to the Bahamas, which is the 4th country outside of the US I’ve visited, and the first where they drove on the wrong side of the road.

My old friend Chuck Stringer died this year, which was surprising and depressing. It also really pushed the whole fear of mortality trip on me, as time keeps moving faster and I keep thinking about the limitation of the whole thing. Visiting a million doctors for various failures with my own body makes me even more fearful of this.

This journal was ten years old in 2007. The domain rumored.com will be ten years old in 2008. The first time I got my VAX account and started using jkonrath@indiana.edu will be 20 years ago in 2009. I moved to Elkart in 1978, which was 30 years ago. In 1988, I worked at Wards, and my weekly paycheck was less than my 401K contribution these days. A nice round number like that occurring today makes me start thinking about this stuff too much.