Vale MMX! Ave MMXI!

It has come to my attention that it is apparently incumbent upon me as a blogger to ruminate on the year just past and on the one just begun. Let me tell you, 2010 is going to be hard to top. I got married. I earned an Associate’s Degree and began the last two years of study for a Bachelor’s. I presented my first paper at an international academic conference, and had that paper accepted for publication in a reviewed journal. I moved – three times. I spent five days in the hospital with a dodgy heart, and afterward began to learn how to live with more than a little anxiety about it. I made some incredible new friends, and wrote quite a lot. So much happened in 2010 that, even though most of it was really good stuff, my score on the Holmes and Rahe stress scale taken at the end of the year placed me in the “Holy-Shit-Your-Head- Is-Gonna-Explode-Any-Second” category. Still, I was usually having too much fun to realize how stressed out I should have been, and I’m currently writing this in the home I share with a brilliant, beautiful, sexy, and (for the moment) redheaded woman who turns out love me and to be the Girl of My Dreams, so I’m putting 2010 pretty much at the top of my personal “Best Years Ever” list.

And 2011? Well, that remains to be seen, doesn’t it, Readers Mine? Oh, I plan to knock out most of the work on that Bachelor’s Degree I mentioned earlier, and present a paper or two here and there, as well as participate in the Great Buffy Rewatch of 2011, and to be writing from the same house with the same loving woman puttering about, and hopefully the two of us will be stronger for another year of love and life. So much for my plans, but as the poet has it,

“The best laid schemes o’ Mice and Men

Gang aft agley,

An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,

For promis’d joy!”

So in 2011, I’ll pray. For the courage, wisdom, strength, and serenity to meet whatever may come, be it joy or grief. To be able to think about someone else more often than I do of myself, and to be an agent for the good rather than a man of evil. For my shit to hold together when it hits the fan, and to hold my tongue lest I should be the one who throws it. To love well, and be loved well in return, and to be okay in sunshine or storm. Most of all, I’ll pray to remember that every day is a new year, one day at a time, and that I don’t have to spend the days alone, even when I’m all by myself.

Ave Minerva!

Purga mentem. Purga corpus. Purga animum.

Ita est!

Amen.