Uncurb Your Enthusiasm

I like Baltimore, it's a fun town. There's a thriving music and arts community, it's relatively affordable and the streets are all laid out in a sensible grid formation. I've lived here for about 15 years now so I've become a little jaded. OK- I was born jaded, I've become downright surly.

I spent the last year living in Wellborn, Florida. I don't like Wellborn. It's not a fun town, it has no music or arts community, half the roads aren't even paved let alone laid out in a sensible grid. It was an eye opening experience to live in an ultraconservative southern town during a recession. Like one of those scenes from A clockwork Orange where they pry your eyes open and force you to read things like a giant church sign that says, "Get her done for Jesus!". Actually, that was one of the more amusing things I saw down there. Less amusing was the poverty, the lack of education, the meth epidemic, and the frightningly depressed economy. The young people that are going nowhere fast and their parents that have already been.

A good thing came out of my Year of Living Dingily. I have a new appreciation for all the advantages with which I grew up. My parents (total buzzkills) insisted on a good education for their children, it was a given that we would all have the opportunity to attend college. I went to private schools surrounded by the priviledged, most more priviledged than myslf. I never had to worry about whether there would be enough food in the house, whether the electricity would get cut off, whether we would have heat. Those thoughts never entered my head, so I was free to fill my head with other things, not all of them erudite. I am thankful for the good life that I have now, and for all the great friends and family that I have so often taken for granted.

Yes, I know this post is totally gay.

Worst Blogger of All Time

I totally suck at this blogging thing. I sort of fell off the face of the civilized world in 2008. I got lost in every sense of the word. I'm hopeful that I will do a better job of clinging to what's left of my sanity in '09. I'm glad to be home in Baltimore after a year of commuting back and forth to Florida, trying to keep everyone just happy enough... and succeeding only in making myself completely miserable and psychotic. 2008 was a disappointing year for me, a year of lame and dead horses, a year of floundering aimlessly in a difficult and uninspiring environment, a year of losing focus both figuratively and literally. I just didn't feel like I had anything of import to say and I had difficulty maintaining any thoughts for long enough to form anything but the most rudimentary opinions about them. This sucks... that stinks... ouch... You get the picture.

This month has already been one of highs and lows. I got home got both my horses settled in at a new farm. Started teaching again was just starting to feel like I had my feet under me when I heard that the horse I had been riding in Florida for all of '08, who I loved like one of my own, died suddenly with a foal in utero. That sent me reeling again for a couple of weeks. I'm still trying to get my bearings up here, and the weather is not cooperating! A year in the south has made me delicate and persnickety with regard to cold and freezy pellet shaped precipitation.

I've been told that New Year's resolutions lead to depression and insanity, but since I'm already most of the way there.... I resolve to use '09 to try to dislodge my head from my ass.