Some thoughts as 2020 begins...

This is a joke I have to make, given my abysmal vision (going all the way back to first grade! I'm the proverbial "coke bottle glasses" guy, but I've been wearing contacts for twenty years, so don't feel too bad for me, and quit reading this parenthetical digression, already), but 2020!  At last I have perfect eyesight!

Wasn't this supposed to be the magical far future?  How did we get here?  (Same as it ever was, same as it ever was.)

(Reference to a message board I don't visit anymore and/or has relocated and is bizarrely much harder to access, a switch that happened last year.)

(Anyway.)

A week ago I was severely depressed.  I should explain.  A week ago, counting from when I'm writing this, 5 PM EST, I was in New Jersey.  My sister's wedding had taken place late that morning and I had just spent a glorious afternoon with my niece, the Burrito.  I hadn't seen her (not counting video chats) for six months, and we picked up right where we had left off.  I cried at the wedding, not because of the wedding, but because it was now official, that my niece was part of someone else's family, and I wasn't a part of it.  She was upset while pictures were being taken just after the ceremony, insisting I was part of the family, and all I could do was cherish that she still believed. 

Getting to the wedding was adventurous.  I have rarely traveled on my own.  On the few occasions I have, I've been able to successfully make the connections (whether on a train, a plane, or a bus, or John Candy & Steve Martin's automobiles) (a movie I've never seen).  But it's one of those nightmare scenarios that usually only manifest in my actual nightmares (I have a recurring one where I can't find the buildings for any of my classes in college, which for the record was never actually a problem).  This time I had to get to the airport, catch a connecting flight, and then find my way to the hotel.  The return trip would be easier, just one flight, but I think I was actually more nervous that morning, because I needed to stick the landing, as it were.  Of course I did all that.  Mostly flawless victory.  (TSA really doesn't like sweat, for whatever reason.  Weirdos.) 

I had to book the flights to accommodate what I thought at the time was a fairly small window of opportunity, a Friday-to-Sunday deal.  Long story short, but originally I thought I wouldn't get vacation approval, because the wedding was in the Bermuda triangle of holidays.  Later, I got more time off than I could've dreamed, so I had plenty of time off.  But if I'd been able to leave sooner, I would've had more time with my niece.

I always tend to begin preparations with the best possible results in mind (I packed copies of some of my books in case anyone at the wedding, or even a great seatmate on the plane! was interested, for instance; every copy came back with me, alas).  I thought I might still get more time with the Burrito, either later Saturday night or even Sunday morning, but that didn't happen.  I spent Sunday waiting and waiting and waiting.  And that was the whole day, until the flight, and getting home, and the day still had plenty of hours left, and that was kind of weird, like the whole day was a vacuum that never really switched on.

The vacation time, I would've spent a lot more of it writing, at pretty much any other point in my life.  I have written a few things, here and there, recently, but haven't tackled anything major.  A year ago I was in one of those big projects.  I've done editing recently.  I almost quit one of the editing projects in the fear that the thing wasn't actually salvagable, but then I realized, at the time, that was exactly what I meant to write.  Even with some needed editing, this wasn't really a case of a young writer not knowing any better.  Even if I were to write it differently today, that's what I wanted to say back then.  That's the kind of writer I am.  There was a reason for that approach.  So I gave myself permission to breathe.

And I've written and submitted a few things.  One was a short story for a comic book company, and the other for one of those contests.  Of course it'd be nice to get one or both accepted.  One of my goals for the new year is to write more, regardless, and to keep submitting.  I've gotten really horrible about that in recent years.  I just stopped trying.  

I've talked here about some of the big projects I want to tackle, and I do want to tackle one or all of them within the next year.  My schedule at work is changing at the end of the month, and suddenly it feels like the break I only thought I got with a different change-up last year, which never really worked out the way I thought it would.  I tend to react better with a more limited window than a wider one, and that's what I'm going to have, and hopefully I react accordingly.  As always, we'll see.

I don't know where the year will take me.  I'd love to move, to find myself once again in the vicinity of my niece, but again, I don't want to be selfish.  Her new family is her new family, and I don't want to get in the way.  That's just how things stand.  I could pursue other changes.  Things could change.  Things could stay the same.  The future, as always, is wide open.

At the moment, I'm okay with that.  I got new glasses at the end of the year, the first time in a very long time, and these things tend to go, at first it was hugely disorienting, and whatever technology they're using these days, I noticed things I'd never noticed before, not because my vision was suddenly so much better, with glasses, than it had been, but because the technology was making colors pop out, like 3D glasses, and that made things quite interesting.  Now it's weird noticing how my vision is different from glasses to contacts, in a totally different way.

Something like 2020.  Something like that.