2005, In Brief

Happy new year, you crazy kids. More importantly, happy (belated) winter solstice! It can only get sunnier from here on out...

How was your 2005, all told? I think I would describe mine as The Year Of Sustainable Growth. There weren’t any major transitions or milestones. We spent another year loving our life in Park Slope. Our two boys (now ages two and four) went from trying to kill each other 50% of the time, to trying to kill each other 10% of the time. I published another book that sold a little better than the last one, and that got me on all sorts of crazy television shows. I wrote half of the next book. (More on that later.) And I just sold the proposal for the book after that. (More on that way later.) If there were changes in 2005, they mostly had to do with my public life: I spent the spring and early summer doing 24/7 media for Everything Bad, and then most of the fall running around like a madman doing speeches.

There are some years where I’ve spent most of the time wondering: is this whole project going to work out? You worry about your web startup, or your newborn child, or your imminent move, or trying to make ends meet as a full-time writer. You live with this shadowed sense that it could all fall apart at any moment, or that there’s something fundamentally unfeasible about the course you’ve set for yourself. This year -- for the most part -- left me feeling that, absent any gruesome turns of fate, the life we’ve been building here can continue on, if we stay vigilant about it, if I keep coming up with semi-interesting things to write about, if the kids stay out of juvenile detention, if the terrorists don’t do whatever it is they’re plotting to do on all those illegally wiretapped international calls.

I know: a lot of ifs. But far fewer than most, right? So a good year all around, with much to be thankful for. Here’s hoping yours was as good, or better.

Comments

[Liz Lawley]

For your sake, I hope that 50%->10% shift in murderous sibling behavior is indeed sustainable. Ours wasn't. At ages 9 and 11, we've only recently dropped from >50% to maybe (at best) 25%.