Extenuating Circumstances

I'm not a big New Year's Resolutions guy. Perhaps especially this year when the new year doesn't feel like it will actually offer anything "new" out of the gate on January 1. Last year's post of goals for the year was a reach to try to create some kind of rubric for judging 2011. But the thing I think is that having goals like that is like trying to decide who you want for President based on a single issue. What I mean is that things often come up that you don't expect, and it's those things that have a tendency to shape a term in office, or in the case I'm writing about right now, a year in the life.

In a lot of ways, I think I can recast 2011 as being successful, even if it feels like it wasn't. This was a year of being under fire. At the bowling alley, a man got into it with my boss and started a fight that ended with him getting tased by police and me giving a report of the action to an officer. With the Storm, it was the year that a computer had massive failure and I overcame it to provide regular-level audio performance from my laptop. It was a year for trying something new with the Aquasox and for standing up for myself. It was a year for choosing values over objects.

I can consider this year a failure for not buying a laptop, or I can brush it aside knowing that I had the ability to buy a laptop if I could be happy with myself making outgoing collections phone calls. The choices I made this year may not always have been the best for my bottom line, but I do think that they were among the better choices I could have made for myself in terms of my physical and emotional self.

In that way, 2011 winds up playing out a lot more like 2008. I did a semester of graduate school (for business) before realizing that it really wasn't where I belonged. I took a risk and came back to Seattle to look for work. It took me about 10 weeks of looking and sending resumes until I found the job with the bowling alley. If 2012 ends up like 2009, I think I'll be fairly happy with it.