2019

I rang in the New Year by taking 10 to pray "with" my wife 2.5 hours away with Counting Crows "A Long December" playing in the background.


Beat the crap out of how I rang in 2018.


It's been a long year for our family.  A year filled with hurts and losses. It seems almost every year I look back and feel like we've been through the wringer, but this was the first time in a long time where the falleness of our world actually seemed to truly touch my wife and I.  And touch us it did.  Rather in the same way one is "touched" by a defensive end or heavyweight boxer.

Yeah, it's been that kind of year.


I came far too close to losing my family for comfort.  Job, too.  My maternal grandmother passed away.  I bid farewell to EMS once again.  I (sort-of) buried Nikki.  I dropped to rare per diem at the hospital where I spent over half of my ten-year career and took a 7-on/7-off position 2.5 hours away.  Heck, I spent a night on the floor of the Milwaukee Intermodal Station, and it was the *highlight* of my trip to Michigan.


I guess the worst part is the number of things still open-ended.  I like resolutions.  I like to get to the end of the year with all the projects wrapped and all the stories closed.


Instead, I'm still two to three months out on the Dot's room.  I'm still getting into the groove of the new job.  I'm still hoping to find out Nikki can be fixed for under $500 (unlikely, but a guy can dream, eh?).


Still, I'm coming to understand that every failure can be seen as a success, as long as you survive it. 


One of my favorite forms of entertainment is Schlock Mercenary by Howard Tayler, an epic (17 years and counting) daily webcomic.  I read it because while it primarily involves the sort of humor one expects from a strip with "Schlock" in the name and a titular character routinely confused for an vocal and ambulatory pile of poo, it often contains physics jokes, and occasionally wonderful bits of wisdom.  One of the last of those is the final of the "70 Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries":  "Failure is not an option. It is mandatory. The option is whether or not to let failure be the last thing you do."


2018 was the scene of the greatest failures for our family, but it was also a year of choosing to get back up.  In that way, 2018 was also the scene of our greatest successes.  I'd like to think 2019 won't be quite as bad, but it will certainly involve at least a few failures at some points, but as long as we're still on our feet at the end, I'll call it a success, too.


Finally, also in the words of Howard Tayler:  2019 can’t be good to you if you’re not good to it.