Okay.  Okay.  Okay.  Things have quieted down somewhat downstairs.  The cats have emerged from hiding.

7.31 to go in the half.  It’s going to be a long night.

Why, oh why, did I decide that it was a good idea to put my computer in a different room from my television set?

Then again, if it weren’t for the running back and forth, would I find myself frantically posting like this every time I got really, really involved in an episode of The Sopranos?

Musberger:  “And now, in a battle of field position, Oklahoma has a great opportunity.”

Isn’t football by definition a battle of field position?

This is only topped by the color commentator I once heard during a college basketball game (when? dunno), who expostulated that “in order to win this game, [Team X] is going to have to put more points on the board than [Team Y].

Yeah.  Uh-huh.

9.00 to go in the first, and I have officially scared my cats half to death.  “She doesn’t usually scream at the picture-box,” they shrieked before running off to hide upstairs.

Less than two minutes in and already I’m on the verge of a heart attack.

Just thought I’d share.

All of a sudden, everybody’s reminding me of the best thing I saw in London on my second trip there this year (the Thanksgiving rendition):  The Weather Project, an installation in the main entry salon (the Turbine Hall) of the Tate Modern.

It’s an astonishing sight—and for the eightieth time in the last year, I’m kicking myself for not having a digital camera, as the pictures that I took remain trapped on a half-finished roll of film.  My favorite aspect of it—beyond the glow of the “sun,” beyond the mist, beyond the reflective “sky,”—was the active participation of the viewers, nearly a hundred of whom were sprawled on the ground in various sunbathing attitudes.  Forget the snarkiness of the CT commenter, who finds the sun “washed out and artificial” and the involvement of the onlookers “creepy”; the installation is worth visiting, and lingering in.

Welcome to 2004.  The year started while I was asleep, as I predicted; after a minor DVD-marathon (yeah, yeah, yeah; I’ve been a Buffy-fan for years, but somehow never made the spin-off leap.  I’m now… somewhat intrigued, though not enough to find out when the current episodes air) and several bowls of my not-quite-famous-but-still-pretty-darn-good chicken and sausage gumbo, I was dead asleep by 11 pm.

Which was frankly fine by me.  I’ve never really taken to New Year’s Eve, much as I’ve never taken to Valentine’s Day; enforced festivity, much like enforced romance, has always felt to me like a contradiction in terms.

But yesterday—now, yesterday was a celebration:  I spent the day in my office, working.  On my own projects.  Reading, thinking, editing.  And the best news is that I’ve got a little over two more weeks of the same ahead of me.

Despite its grayness (and yes, for you MLA-goers, things are a bit grayer here in the Inland Empire than they were in San Diego), despite the potential for post-holiday let-down, despite the need to prepare for the impending new semester, this part of January is one of my favorite times of the year:  I get a fresh calendar, and thus literally and metaphorically the time and space to imagine a new future.

Paralleling, then, Liz’s call for retrospective blessings-counting, is my own call:  I’d like to hear from you, on your hopes for 2004.  I’m not much of a believer in the New Year’s resolution as a form (like New Year’s Eve’s enforced festivity, and Valentine’s Day’s enforced romance, the enforced drive toward self-improvement embodied in the resolution just doesn’t do it for me—or for many others, judging from how few such resolutions actually get kept), so that’s not what I’m after.  What I’d like to hear about are hopes and dreams, future possibilities, worlds you’d like to see come into being this year.

My own hopes:

To get R. home, and keep him here a while.

To find a publisher, and put the old project to bed.

To find some clarity on the new project.

To make a dent in the growing masses of unread books I’ve accumulated.

Most of all, to find myself, this time next year, in a world substantively more peaceful, and in a country substantively more compassionate, than the one I find myself in today.