2011 lookback: An embarrassment of riches

Even when I kept a paper journal, back in college, I always loved writing a “year in review” entry at the end of December. This meme, while a meme, makes it easy. Without further ado:

What did you do in 2011 that you’d never done before?
Ran a half-marathon in two hours, stood on Cuban soil, became an aunt, took a four-week photography class, took a staycation. Went to six concerts (Iron & Wine, Mason Jennings, Death Cab for Cutie with Frightened Rabbit, Mountain Heart, Amos Lee, and the Civil Wars). Walked on Lake Shore Drive after a blizzard. Attended a mayoral debate. Kept a daily gratitude list for a month. Cheered on runners in the Chicago marathon. Named my son.

Did you keep your new year’s resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
My 2011 resolutions were to run the half-marathon again and beat my first time (done!), become comfortable driving again (woefully not done!), continue reading at least one book per month (done), take a more in-depth photography class (done), and hang out in my neighborhood café in the winter when I feel sad about the lack of light (semi-done; I could have indulged in this more often).

2012 is going to be a year like no other. Of course, my resolutions are focused on Will—on doing the very best I can to make him feel safe and comfortable and happy in his new home. I’m going to do some intense reading on attachment this winter. I want to focus on patience and calmness. Overall, I want to start learning how to become the best parent I can. I also want to focus on keeping our marriage strong as we embark on this huge change in our life.

I am so, so excited to love my child in person.

I’d like to run my third half-marathon; I think I can do it, depending on the timing of my maternity leave. I want to write here at least once a month, and I want to keep taking ballet classes when possible.

Where did you travel in 2011?
San Francisco and Havana, Cuba! Closer to home: northern Michigan for a weeklong camping trip.

What would you like to have in 2012 that you lacked in 2011?
Obviously, Will.

What dates or images from 2011 will remain etched upon your memory?
November 10, the day I received the phone call at work that changed everything. November 13, the day we knew for sure that Will was our son.

Then, in chronological order:
--April 17, the day I held my week-old nephew for the very first time, and looked down and saw my family in the tiny, red, scrunched-up face of a newborn.
--The Friday night in late May when I stumbled across a blog post discussing the fact that Korean adoptions would be on hold for the rest of the year.
--The morning of June 22, when I wandered into the kitchen and found a small gray box waiting for me on the counter. Beautiful, beautiful diamond earrings from a husband who continues to surprise and delight me after 10 years of marriage.
--The very early morning of August 14, watching the cobalt clouds rush across the downtown skyline as I walked toward the start of the half-marathon.
--December 8, seeing the island of Cuba from the sky for the first time, the passengers clapping as we landed, my hands shaking and a little Cuban-American boy yelling excitedly to his mother, “We’re in CUBA!”
--December 10, visiting the neighborhood where my mother grew up, walking the rooms where my ancestors lived. I will never, ever forget this day and the way it made me feel.

What were your biggest achievements of the year?
As with last year, running! I had a personal best of 24:35 in a 5k, and I shaved 15 minutes off my half-marathon time. I wrote here almost every month, and I took four photo walks: two in Uptown and Edgewater after the blizzard, one in the Loop, and one in the neighborhood this fall. I celebrated 10 years of marriage, and I started taking ballet classes again after 21 years.

What was your biggest failure?
Driving more often. I really, really need to get on this.

Did you suffer illness or injury?
Some illnesses here and there, but I’m so happy to be able to type that none of them was serious.

What was the best thing you bought?
New plain white dishes. An oil painting in Cuba. A flowered dress from Akira. My iPhone.

Whose behavior merited celebration?
Cuban bloggers who are brave enough to speak out against the oppression and propaganda of their country’s government. Read them. The wider their audience, the more protected they are from persecution.

Whose behavior saddened you?
I wish the Korean government would embrace an adoption policy that works better for children who need families.

Where did most of your money go?
The mortgage, Cuba, adoption fees.

What did you get really excited about?
Will. Cuba. Running. Game of Thrones. Eating at Topolobampo for our 10th wedding anniversary. Living outside on our deck in the summer. Girls’ weekend in Chicago. Our staycation. Working on Will’s nursery. My neighborhood. Lagunita’s A Little Sumpin’ Sumpin’ Ale. Big Star. The Violet Hour. Watching Stella run on the beach.

What song will always remind you of 2011?
Anything by The Head and the Heart and The Civil Wars. The Beatles song “Till There Was You,” which John learned to play on his guitar.

What do you wish you’d done more of?
Photography and driving.

What do you wish you’d done less of?
Worrying; thinking in terms of “what ifs.”

What was your favorite TV program?
Game of Thrones, Mad Men, and Modern Family.

What was the best book you read?
I read 12 books this year—three less than last year, but four of them were giant books in the Game of Thrones series. The New Yorker continues to take up a lot of my reading time! The GoT books and Freedom by Jonathan Franzen were my favorites.

What was your greatest musical discovery?
The Civil Wars

How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2011?
I finally tried on a pair of skinny jeans and felt sad that I’d waited so long. Also, I happily wore lots of dresses and skirts in the summer.

What political issue stirred you the most?
Gay rights and health care… same as last year.

What kept you sane?
Late Sunday afternoons with a glass of wine and InStyle magazine, preferably on the deck. Summertime camping. Any stretch of a few days where I didn’t touch a computer. (Mind you, these are exactly the same as 2009 and 2010.)

Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2011.
Our family and friends provide us with an embarrassment of riches. I can run faster than I’d ever imagine possible. Also: What you think about the reflection in the mirror isn’t the point; just put on the leotard and go.

March malaise

So we have a whirlpool tub in our second bathroom. And for the past few days, whenever I’ve gone in there, I’ve seen a small daddy longlegs spider in the tub, quietly hanging out. Sometimes he’s at one end of the tub, then at the other; I’ve also seen him resting halfway up the tub wall. But I don’t think he can climb out, since it’s been five days now and he’s still there.

When I was a kid, my family vacationed in the Pocono Mountains every summer. One August day, we came back from a hike, and as I washed my hands and looked at myself in the cabin’s bathroom mirror, a large daddy longlegs appeared in my hair, crawling from the back of my head around toward my face. Understatement: This was a very traumatic experience, and let’s just say that now, in adulthood, when I’m very stressed out, I have nightmares in which insects play a starring role. In other words, I’m too much of a wuss to somehow capture the tub dweller and release him outdoors. I also don’t want to kill him. So I guess I’m just watching his slow demise, trapped in a big blank white tub, endlessly attempting to climb the walls with no way out.

Oh, March. The malaise wants to anchor in and I’m trying to knock it back. The days are getting longer—some evenings I’ve been walking Stella in watery, faded light, instead of a solid dark blue—and good spring things are on the horizon, but still, it’s March. Some weeks feel so much like a hamster wheel I can hardly believe it. I think about traveling, camping, about sitting out on the back deck, about going to the farmers’ market and the dog beach, 5k’s and running outside. There are so many things that I do in the warm months that disappear in the cold ones, and I’m left feeling a little bored and one-dimensional.

I’m attempting to combat this in small ways. One day after work last week, I sat in a café with my New Yorker and a chai for an hour, enjoying the bustle of people around me, good words and good tea. Next week I’m going to a fiction reading downtown. I often feel like I should take better advantage of living in the city. I mean, I do things—I see the ballet, attend readings, go to a museum a few times a year (in the past few weeks I’ve done the Art Institute and the Chicago History Museum). John and I usually see three or four concerts a year. I spend a large amount of time eating and drinking with friends. I volunteer once a month at a meal for the hungry. And in the summer we’re out in full force: street festivals, markets, races, the free outdoor concerts in Millennium Park. Then again, I don’t usually feel this way in July.

I guess what it comes down to is that right now, I want more variety in my life, something that’s stimulating and different. I feel like I’m wasting time, which kills me. I’m not doing the things I do during the warmer months, and I feel blah as a result. So a few days ago I decided that I need to take some sort of class… Cooking? A language? Art? (I used to love to draw.) A history or literature course? Ballet? Or, the one that makes the most sense: photography? I’d need to finally buy a DSLR and learn how to use it, which I find so daunting, for some reason, even though I adore taking photos and looking at photos and am often frustrated with my limited little point-and-shoot.

Then, yesterday, a surprise. A bonus—and a totally unexpected one—fell into my lap at work. It was like the universe was saying, Go. Do it. Stop the whining and the malaising and just go.

So I’m going. I’m going to buy a real camera, with a real lens (my friend Jessie provided some terrific guidance on this last fall), and then I’m going to sign up for a real, serious photography class, with computer labs and shooting assignments and everything I need to really take this interest of mine and make the most of it. Even though I’ll do this during spring and summer, when I’ll be busier and more uplifted than I am now, I know I’ll still have the time for it—and this does feel like the right time in my life for such an undertaking. And for photography, the light—the light will be better in spring anyway.

Postscript: To really tie up this entry neatly, I should also say something poetic about rescuing the spider, right? Not sure I’m ready to go that far, but I’m thinking John could fill in…

Dispatch from Antarctica

Originally posted on Diary-X

Cold. Very, very cold. Finger-aching, sweater-and-coat–penetrating, nose-hair–freezing fucking cold. Today’s high will be 16 degrees. Very smart idea, breaking up with the college boyfriend who eventually moved to Alaska. It hurt at the time, but did it hurt as much as my face did this morning, after 15 minutes spent waiting for the damn train on that unprotected wind-magnet of a station platform? I think not.

*****

Of course, once I boarded the train, I was rewarded for my suffering with the sight of a shabby older man, sitting with his briefcase in his lap, carefully applying a nice shade of coral-red lipstick to his cracked lips. He followed that up with a few coats of mascara, then attached a gaudy, dangling clip-on earring to his right earlobe. It all matched perfectly with his rumpled men’s clothing and week-old beard.

*****

I witnessed an attempted mugging a few days ago. Nothing says “2004 is gonna be a great year!” more than seeing a crime committed at 6 p.m. on the sidewalk two blocks from your home. I was walking home from the el station after work, and I wasn’t the only one around—the neighborhood was fairly busy with pedestrians and cars. Suddenly, less than a block ahead of me, I saw three people bundled in winter coats jostling each other. One person fell into the street, and the others—they looked like teenagers—took off sprinting toward a nearby alley, into which they disappeared. The person lying in the street was crying “My God! Why, God? Why?” I jogged over to find a middle-aged woman—maybe 60 years old—clutching her large purse to her chest and struggling to get to her feet. She was unhurt, and they didn’t get her purse, but she was very shaken and upset. I put my arm around her and helped her up. I told her to call the police and report it. What else could I do? She spoke in a foreign accent—something Eastern European—and kept saying “My papers! They could have gotten my papers!” The whole incident left me pretty disturbed; I never thought this sort of thing would happen during rush hour so close to my quiet neighborhood el station. I’m gripping my bag a little tighter these days.

*****

John and I made two Big Purchases last weekend (thanks, freelance work!): a digital camera and a loveseat. Post-Christmas is when the monster sales take place, so we timed our shopping accordingly. Our shiny new digicam (I keep seeing the words “digital camera” abbreviated in this manner, but I can’t say I like it) is a Canon Powershot A70, 3.2 megapixels. It’s a little bit point-and-shoot, a little bit SLR, and we love it. It provides me with a deep, abiding sense of glee, being able to take pictures of anything, at any time, then immediately view (and delete) them. I’m looking at everything differently now—as soon as we read the instructions and install the big memory chip that we bought, I’m bringing the camera to work, to capture all the sights that have illustrated my commute for the last two years.

The loveseat will finally solve the seating problem we have in our living room. As in, when we have two or more people over, there isn’t enough of it. The loveseat is made of dark-brown leather, and it was on sale, and it is luscious. It’s very modern, with clean, spare lines, and it’s a dream come true for John, who’s been pining away for a leather armchair since God knows when. (He would always point out the chairs in the Restoration Hardware catalog, which were priced around, oh, $1,300, and I would laugh and laugh. $1,300! For a chair! One person can fit in a chair. I’m sorry, I would say, but the comfort of your snobby ass is not worth $1,300.)

*****

Simon, Garfunkel, and I took down the Christmas tree on Sunday. I placed their greatest hits in the CD player (how I love the song “America,” and of course “Bookends”—Time it was and what a time it was it was/A time of innocence, a time of confidences. Long ago it must be, I have a photograph/Preserve your memories, they're all that's left you) and slowly took down all the tree ornaments, boxing them up for next year. Snow was falling outside, big blowsy white flakes. Once the tree was devoid of all decorations, John picked it up and took it outside to the alley, the tree shedding its path of needly tears through our apartment. I took down our stockings, the red and green candles, the wooden nativity set. I always feel a bit hollow when the Christmas season ends—I remember feeling that way even as a girl. The living room seems so empty without that lit-up little spruce. Now begins the long, slow march of winter, and of tax season, and of no holidays until Memorial Day. It’d be easy for a girl to get depressed if she didn’t have a girls' reunion and her birthday (the big 28!) to anticipate in the coming weeks.