Are my eyes really blue?

I am not getting any free shit for writing this blog. I am kind of bitter about this. I would like some free shit. I'm not proud. Specifically, if the Coca-Cola Corporation wants to send me a shit-ton of Coke Zero or Mexican-bottled Coca-Cola, that would be fine. If the Dr Pepper folks want to send me case upon case of the Imperial Cane Sugar Dr Pepper, that will be awesome. If Dell wants to ship me a free Inspiron Mini 10v (NOT Mini 10), I will take back roughly 1/3 of the stuff I have said about them (but probably not about Michael Dell himself, as he is a big box of douche). If the fine folks at Dr Martens want to send me more free boots, please do, as that is the only way I'll ever get new Docs after buying two more pair this year.

This has been your full disclosure. We now return to your regularly scheduled bullshit.

One year ago today, I got a phone call I had been dreading. I had interviewed for a new job the week of Veterans Day, but owing to a combination of circumstances, I wound up posting 45 minutes late to the interview. I faced the guns against something like 9 potential interviewers (as it turns out, most of the rest of the workgroup) and went home knowing that if the lateness didn't get me, the salary would (even if I'd volunteered to take the cut).

So I was fully anticipating the "thank you for your interest but we've decided to go in another direction" call. Instead, I got the "we'd like to offer you a job and a chunk of change (which with benefits will be more or less what you get now) starting first of the year." That was my Christmas miracle.

Three hundred sixty-five days later, I have to say it was the best present I could have gotten. Because of this job, I don't drive to work much anymore - I can commute by train and on foot, for free. Because of this job, I have enough sick leave to see the doctors to check out the pain in my shoulder, or rehab my bum knee, or not go to work if I'm spewing flu-like symptoms. Because of this job, I have enough leave to go to Colorado, Alabama, Oregon, Washington, Canada, all over California, and still have enough time to take off and squire Team Black Swan around the city. (Y'all come back now, y'hear?) Because of this job, my cellphone is mostly paid for and I can work out three times a week for no money. Because of this job, I'm typing this on a Mac that was made this year, instead of one that was already obsolete when I came to California. (Yes, the first machine I was issued at the last job was a TiBook G4. In 2007.)

Mostly, though, because of this job I am no longer occupationally miserable on a daily basis. The last time I could say that reliably was in 2006. Maybe the first couple weeks of 2007, when I was still at the Big Fruit.

Pair that with some growth in other areas, some necessary adjustment, and I daresay my life has turned around pretty much 180 degrees from where it was at the end of 2007, which was about as shitty a year as I've ever had without losing a parent. It's good to be back above water. And so, once again, ladies and gents...welcome to Christmas. =)

So a couple of weeks ago, I was up in Moraga for a Vandy game at St Mary's. If you ever cross over Checkpoint Caldecott, I strongly recommend a trip to see the Gaels in action - their little 3500-seat bandbox gym lights up with as loud and rowdy a crowd as you'll find in college hoops, and the team (chock full of Aussies) is actually pretty damn good. Vandy managed to blow an 11-point lead and won by 2, and St Mary's had a shot at the end that would have won it.

But that is not the point of this post. The point of this post is that they played a LOT of recorded music, much to my chagrin as a former stalwart of my undergrad basketball pep band* - and sprinkled in among Miley Cyrus and random hip-hop was Journey's "Don't Stop Believing". (Believing? Believin'? Whatever.)

Not only did the students go apeshit when the opening piano hit, they sang along. The whole damn song.

When the hell did a Journey track from my elementary school days turn into some sort of Gen-Z youth anthem? How does shit like this happen? My God, it's not like we were all singing and dancing along to a Doors song back when I was in high sch--

--what?

Never mind.

They didn't back into it, they didn't stumble into it, they didn't pull it off in the last second on a miracle play - Alabama went out, took the ball to start, and beat down the Florida Gators like they'd stolen something. The #1 team in the country held scoreless in the second half, the #1 defense in the country shredded for 32 points and almost 500 yards...and Greg McElroy playing like some other guys who wore a #12 on their back for the Tide.

The only thing to give pause is that Alabama has never beaten Texas in eight tries. 0-7-1, the last one a 14-12 Cotton Bowl loss in 1982. Assuming they get by Nebraska (and the Big XII has a history of bad upsets in their title game), the Longhorns - perhaps Alabama's most implacable nemesis among the big-ticket programs of college football - will be waiting in Pasadena.

From what I've seen, Texas has no shot to defend Alabama - every team in that conference seems content to give up 35 if they can score 40. The matchup would be Colt McCoy against an Alabama defense that, to the best of my knowledge, hasn't really been confronted with a high-powered passing game all year, bar perhaps Ole Miss. But then, I didn't start paying attention until the Tennessee game, so I don't know what the deal is at this point.

NOW...the matchups in 1990, if the old rules were still in effect:

SUGAR: Alabama vs TCU
ORANGE: Georgia Tech vs Texas
ROSE: Ohio State vs Oregon
FIESTA: Iowa vs Cincinnati
COTTON: Florida vs Boise State

(I assume that the Big 12 takes the Big 8 tie-in, and that the only other locks are Sugar and Rose.)

Basically, the look of things is this: Alabama beats TCU, national champs. Alabama loses and Texas beats Ga Tech - Texas national champs. Alabama and Texas both lose - TCU national champs.

But right now, it's almost a mortal lock that the matchup is Alabama-Texas, and most Bama fans will tell you that they'd much rather take a chance with the Horns than with TCU or Cincy, both of whom are red hot. The problem, if you assume the legitimacy of Boise State, is that there is no mechanism to cope with FIVE UNDEFEATED TEAMS.

BTW, to steal a line from a couple of years ago..."Dr Pepper Big 12 Championship. Somewhere, Mr Pibb is laughing his ass off."

1) The SEC has never lost a BCS title game.

2) Alabama has never beaten Texas.

3) From 2002 on, the #1 team has lost every BCS title game but one.

Offhand, you don't like to see that math.

On the other hand, the Big 12 was dreadful this year - the Big 12 North produced exactly one bowl-eligible team, and they lost to Texas on a neutral site by one point, holding them to 13.

Much will depend, ultimately, on how well Bama prepares. The memory of last year's humiliation in the Sugar Bowl should be ever-present. With a month to watch tape, Texas will presumably be prepared to stack the box against Mark Ingram and force Greg McElroy to throw. Whether Terrence Cody can replicate Nebraska's success in threatening McCoy with a big space-eating defensive lineman remains to be seen.

Be afraid. Be very afraid. And then make the fear work for you.

I'm going over to MarsEdit for the time being - for some reason, you have to repost from ecto five or six times before stuff shows up. I'm not crazy about how MarsEdit formats with raw HTML, but whatever. I can't believe ecto hasn't been updated in years...

Still sick btw. Sinuses mostly under control, but coughing is out of control. Meanwhile, I finally had the cervical MRI yesterday - it was certainly more open than the last one, but I'd be lying if I said it was fun and enjoyable. I'm starting to seriously question my loadout - it may be time to go for a one-shoulder bag over the right shoulder, with as little as possible in it...I swear this is not just an excuse to look at Timbuk2 bags again ;]

That was a strange year. I wasn't really a kid anymore - I don't remember if I was still getting toys or not that Christmas, but I definitely wasn't by the next year. I was pretty much over my Star Wars fandom but hadn't gotten into comic books in a big way yet, and for the first time, I was contemplating writing things that weren't assigned in class.

I remember going to Cullman to go to JC Penney, because it was no further than driving to the other side of Birmingham for the same thing. I remember an obsession with orange Tic Tacs, eating an entire box at one go whenever I could get to it. I remember a whole slew of Christmas songs on four cassettes from Reader's Digest, which was the first time I started to get the sense that our cultural memory of Christmas depends on Victorian England and wartime America in the 1940s in roughly equal measure.

Mainly I remember it being cold and quiet, and feeling like I was in some sort of limbo between phases of my life. I guess that's why I drift back to it this time of year - that was one of those pivot points where I could change the direction of my life. Not a critical one, certainly not a patch on what came later, but the beginning of growing up.

...for not telling me there was a new version of ecto back in February. Now I have to pay for an upgrade. Maybe. We'll see.

This is Joe Lieberman, advocating Medicare buy-in as an alternative to a public option, only three months ago.

Key quote: "As to how 47 million uninsured will afford coverage, Lieberman said only 12 million don't have insurance because they cannot afford it. By allowing citizens who are not eligible for Medicare or Medicaid to buy in for a rate below the private market, the government can extend coverage to more of those who are currently uninsured, he said."

There are only two explanations: Lieberman has lost his mind, or he is specifically out to undermine the Democrats at every turn - and sandbag the signature initiative of someone who specifically came to Connecticut to campaign for him over Ned Lamont in the primary in 2006. Either way, it should now be obvious to anyone that Harry Reid's failure to shitcan Lieberman before the new Congress even opened is proof that he is not fit to lead - the Democrats don't have 60 votes, they never did, and letting Lieberman create that charade, however briefly, has done far more harm than good.

Remarkably, in the span of one year, Google has managed to become both Microsoft and Apple. Microsoft, in that they have your computing experience by the nuts, and Apple, in that mainstream non-tech press now goes nuts for literally everything they announce.

Dial it back a bit and look at what actually happened Friday. A bunch of Google employees were given the latest version of an HTC handset. Not that big a deal - they all got a G1 two years ago, and Apple gave all its employees iPhones on the eve of the release in 2007. The phone itself is an HTC Passion, something that's been kicking around the rumorsphere for some time - and it was inevitable that Android 2-based hardware would show up for GSM eventually. And while rumors are flying about Google selling the phone directly, nobody - NOBODY - in the United States has had success selling unlocked and unsubsidized phones to the general public. Apple came closest, when they sold the phone unsubsidized and allowed for at-home activation, and that experiment went by the boards in under a year. Unless Google is prepared to take a bath on every handset for the purpose of shipping them into as many hands as possible, they won't have any more success than anybody else pushing a $500 handset with no service.

And yet - people are losing their minds. First they lost it for Android generally (and the Droid in particular) which sort of made sense. They lost it for Wave, which so far has turned out to be a big pile of WTF. And now they're losing it for what is essentially a developer preview device that's only been handed out to employees, not even third party developers let alone the broader public.

Ah well. I'm still not prepared to throw my hands in the air and say "I for one welcome our new Google overlords," but having looked at the balance of my services, I'm more or less OK with the current state of affairs - some Google, some Apple, some self-provided (well, brother-in-law provided) service, and a smattering of other stuff from Yahoo or Evernote or Skype or Mozilla. To be honest, the notion of an 11" netbook running Ubuntu is becoming increasingly attractive...

For whatever reason, ecto is no longer playing nice with Moveable Type on my host. I don't know what the deal is, and for the time being, I have chosen to Reggie Roby ecto and go with MarsEdit - it's a lot more raw-HTML, but it posts reliably (even if it isn't keeping a log of all posts).

(It's particularly galling that I have to run a freakin' SCRIPT to put paragraph breaks in there.)

In 2010, my goal is to either get a cleaned-up Moveable Type 4 install under the hood (complete with the neat new templates) or shift to WordPress at long last. I'm not moving - having my own reliably secure service, for free, which is not being leveraged to sell me stuff, is EXTREMELY important to me. But at some point, I just have to knuckle down and learn how to make this stuff work.

Along similar lines, I am giving serious thought to pooling any Christmas money I get and splashing out on a Dell Mini10v. Now, this is not just gadget glee at work here. It will be a straight-up PC, portable, small enough that I can back the whole thing up on a thumb drive, and suitable for all manner of experiments, including but not limited to:

* Hackintosh

* The limits of Windows 7 Starter

* Sugar

* Ubuntu Netbook Remix

* Chrome

* Xubuntu

* An attempt to live purely in the Google ecosystem for a couple weeks

* An attempt to live outside the Apple ecosystem for a couple weeks (read: doubleTwist to the max)

* An attempt to live entirely without Google/Apple/Microsoft just to see if I can

* The final determination of whether a $300 Atom-processor machine really is "good enough"

I did a hell of a good job living up to my resolutions this year - I think most of them will get a check when I do the rundown the last week of the year. So now comes 2010 - and one of the things I want to do is get back to learning things. I want to plunge back into Windows and Unix and Perl and make myself technical outside the Mac realm again. And if it takes the total immersion approach to do it? So be it.

...this is how it works. You don't get to just sail into town and get whatever you want. People who point to the Bush tax cuts and say "why can't we do that" miss the point: it's always easier to destroy than create, and even then they went through reconciliation instead of the normal process (which is why they're going to sunset and spare us the trouble of having to legislate a huge tax hike to keep the deficit from going supernova). The Democrats made a decision long ago: play it straight, play it big-tent, and you know what? If they hadn't, you'd still be looking at less than 60 votes.

This is how it works. You grind these things out like Johnny Cash: one piece at a time. You bleed and sweat and suffer, and frequently pass things by one vote (ask Al Gore, and Chelsea's future mother-in-law, about the 1993 budget a.k.a. the "Clinton Landslide") and you don't get everything you want. The point is, you pound away at the coal face to get what you can, and then? You come back the next day and do it again. And again. You don't ever get to declare victory and go home in triumph, but that's not how it works.

Grow up, kids. Politics is the art of the possible. If you want to dream, go be a theater major.

(INT. TELEVISION STUDIO, DAY. PROBABLY MORNING.)

DEMOCRAT: What the plan calls for is an individual mandate - everyone has to buy insurance. If you get this through your job, or if you're in Medicare or Medicaid, nothing changes. If you are currently buying your own insurance, or don't have insurance, you will be able to choose from among several plans in a health exchange, which will have millions of customers and will be able to get the kind of rates that big companies get. If you can't afford to buy insurance, we will have financial support available. And to make sure that the insurance companies don't take advantage of a captive audience to just jack up rates, we will have the opportunity to buy into the same insurance program that members of Congress have, a non-profit program, which will help keep the insurance companies honest and prevent them being able to just gouge you for more money. And just to keep everything on the straight and narrow, insurance companies will no longer be able to deny you for pre-existing conditions or drop you because they don't want to cover your illness. They will also have to cover preventive care and health maintenance issues, so you can take care of yourself before you get sick. And with no more wasting money on using the ER for primary care, and the benefits of catching disease and illness before it gets out of hand, everyone will end up saving money in the long run.

REPUBLICAN: DEATH PANELS! GOVERNMENT CONTROL! SOCIALISM! AAAAAAAUGH!!!!

MATT LAUER: Thank you both, we'll be right back with more on Tiger Woods and a missing white girl.

(EXEUNT.)

This is the problem: there is no quick and easy way to explain the health care reform plan beyond the words I put in the mouth of the Democrat above. And the sort of people who broadcast news in this country are simply not bright enough to explain it. They are also unwilling to actually analyze the claims made by either side, whether through stupidity or malice. And honestly, pretty much every television journalist in the country is pussy-whipped by forty years of conservatives screaming "LIBERAL MEDIA" at everyone to the right of Pat Buchannan and terrified of being accused of bias. Consequently, absolute horseshit lies are passed off as an equivalent point of view, because any attempt to delve into the matter and determine the truth makes you some sort of filthy hippie liberal advocate. And since they're too fucking stupid to understand what's actually happening, your media presents the whole thing purely in terms of a horse race: who's up, who's down, who's winning - completely oblivious to the practical reality at hand.

You want to know why Obama's approval rating is 49%? It's because liars, racists, and outright mental defectives are treated by our press as a legitimate part of the discourse, and the slackjawed yokels of the American public go right along with it. Call me an elitist, because I am, and I'll own it proudly - the biggest problem with this country is that we treat stupid people like they're worth taking seriously.

...is the title of my favorite new Christmas song - it was last year's holiday track from the Killers. Their first, "A Great Big Sled," was another solid hit; their second, "Don't Shoot Me Santa" was...less so. But this one was oddly affecting.

Well your eyes just haven’t been the same, Joseph

Will you do what’s right? The position is yours...

Think about this. You're just this guy, a carpenter, making a living for yourself in a Roman-occupied Judea where you're probably lucky just to be hanging onto upper-working-class. Engaged to be married, good decent life ahead of you, and then - out of a clear blue sky - she's pregnant. And it sure as hell wasn't you, and you don't want to make a fuss, but come on - what else are you going to do?

And then, the angel of the Lord shows up, and he's got a message. Yes, she's pregnant, and her baby's daddy is God. You know - Jehovah. YHWH. "I AM THAT I AM." Yeah. And you have to marry her, you have to have the baby, you have to raise the baby as your own, and to cap it all off - proof that the angel of the Lord went to Notre Dame - you can't tell anybody why you're doing it. You have to be the stepfather to the Son of God.

Not just somebody's dad

We have no idea what happened to Joseph. We know he stepped up, married his fiancee, was there at the Temple after eight days, to all accounts brought up his son the best way he knew how. And then...nothing. No mention of him down the home stretch. Not a word about when, or how, he died. Just disappears - not really germane to the story anymore.

I think that irrespective of your faith - or lack thereof - there's a lesson here. There are things we have to do in this life that we probably don't want to, things that drop out of the sky at the worst possible minute, and there's no door number two, no plan B, just this thing that you have to deal with. Whether it's a natural disaster taking your home out from under you, or a parent you never thought of losing suddenly gone, or a pink slip the second week of December, or a phone call from the police at 3 AM, or the doctor walking in and closing the door and sitting down - you just have to swallow hard, accept that this is your life, and face it as best you can.

Joseph is the patron saint of the local parish, and (obviously) of the nearest big city. If the lives of the saints are meant to be exemplars of how we live our lives, you could do worse - get on with it, do the best you can, and don't be a horse's ass about it.

Oh yeah, the song also features Elton John and Neil Tennant. You think that's not an instant classic, well, you're entitled to your wrong opinion. =)

Twenty years ago, I described them as "post-Civil War, pre-Civil Rights." In more recent times, I've asserted that the South can't begin to move forward until they're dead. It seems awfully uncharitable to talk that way about my grandparents - and my parents - but there it is.

Non-urban, mostly Southern, the kind of voters who tipped for Wallace in 1968 and abandoned the Democrats nationally by 1980, these are the people who want the government out of their lives and away from their Medicare and Social Security. They occupy a conservative-populist space that's made millionaires of countless AM radio hosts, a fundamentalist pre-Enlightenment space that doesn't have room for science, logic, reason, or fancy book-larnin'. The phrase "common sense" comes up a lot - it's all gut instinct and what they already believe. And it's a worldview that is essentially and utterly incompatible with 21st century modernity.

This is why things have gotten so bad - these are literally their Last Days. They will fight to the death for their worldview - this is a matter of God and country and what they know to be right, so there's no room for negotiation or compromise or "come let us reason together." And there are elements that are more than happy to harness that rage and desperation to their own ends - with precious little regard for what the endgame looks like.

So how do you prepare for a situation where you can't make a deal? At all? Ever? Your options are twofold at that point, whether it's Afghanistan or Alabama:

1) Containment

2) Elimination

Take it as read that 2) is impossible. You'll never kill every last Taliban or Al-Qaeda, and even if you could, there are always others willing to take their place. All you can do is whatever it takes to minimize the risk that they can get at you.

But then there's Alabama. What was Reconstruction, if not a decade-long attempt at containment?

It's a lot to ask a technologist to go eight days without his laptop. Sending him out for a week with only a smartphone is like sending a soldier to war with only a pistol. And sending him to stay in a rural house with no broadband, no neighbors with wireless, and cell coverage that equals one bar of service, with no data, and only when stood outside - that's sending him out with a pistol and no bullets.

Thankfully, the excuses to hit the road were plentiful. We got to have drinks at an actual W-affiliated hotel in the unlikeliest of places, we got dinner at two different Frank Stitt restaurants in the company of fellow alumni (and Team Black Swan East, natch), we did a little driving and a little shopping and fought some holiday traffic, and had a surprisingly non-disastrous time with the relations.

Lessons learned:

* Cousin Pa is exactly the sort of moron you would expect a 70-year-old who DVRs the entire Fox News Channel weeknight lineup to be. He's interested in buying some of my old guns. I'm uncertain whether it's moral to make a bunch of money off the Obama-hating paranoia of an old racist prick, especially when there's a non-zero chance of seeing the wrong end of those guns someday.

* No amount of time in the old land will ever be enough for my mother, who after eight days wanted to know why we couldn't stay the second week if we were off work. Here's a hint: if my consecutive time in Alabama ever hits double-digits again, somebody has died, or else somebody needs to come shoot me.

* You'll never convince a hick that Scharffen-Berger baking chocolate is superior to the liquid squeeze-pack stuff from the Piggly Wiggly.

* Don't look for quality radio in a town that has two 24-hour sports stations AND Rush Limbaugh on FM.

* I am ruined forever for public transit. The thought of having to drive everywhere, all the time, and at least twenty minutes in each direction for ANYTHING - I'm getting the shakes just thinking about it.

* The right combination of wardrobe, music, and box-of-stuff-out-in-the-garage will convince you that you are much younger than you really are. The practicality of this is left as an exercise for the reader.

* The iPhone is still the Magic Phone by which all others are measured, but it is not suitable for the full use of Facebook, long-form blogging, or really getting the most out of a James Bond movie.

* The Redskins are GHASTLY.

* Cal can't fire their offensive line coach soon enough for me.

* The Mercedes M-class is a piece of shit to drive, and anybody who thought you could build a real Mercedes in Alabama was full of it.

* Your relatives will call your bluff and buy you a Nerf sword as a Christmas present right as somebody launches a terrorist attack on a plane that makes taking said sword back damn near impossible.

* The TSA may actually be sobering up as far as the wet-your-pants response to terrorism. The GOP, sadly, probably never will.

* A peacoat - especially one you got for $37 - is not the optimal piece of outerwear for the South in December, no matter how stylish you think it might look. Get something more collapsable.

* Southwest Airlines isn't as bad as it used to be.

And most important:

* The relief of being on the plane, and the elation of being back in California, and the happiness of just driving through In N Out for a double-double plain, may be a sure sign that Silicon Valley is your home now, and you are absolutely in the right place.

More later.

Come on - in 1999, did you really think it would end up like this?

I'm not even going to put it down to the corrosive effects of the Bush years, because I think that's another symptom, not a cause. Things like "Mission Accomplished" and "Deficits don't matter" and "Heck of a job Brownie" and "welcomed as liberators" didn't give us American Idol, or an endless parade of missing white girls, or the onslaught of reality shows - think about this, ten years ago NBC prime time meant ER or The West Wing. Now it's The Biggest Loser and Jay Leno at 10 PM five nights a week. Just look at the state of college football, for crying out loud - where crying out loud has in fact become the principal means of getting ahead in the world of the BCS.

I don't know if it was just the shock of September 11, or some millennial sense of "we're through with history and now we can sit back and coast" or what it was, but somewhere back there, we were transformed into a nation of pants-wetting fraidycats, with no more curiosity than it takes to sit on the couch sucking down straight high-fructose corn syrup and watching the latest episode of THE REAL OOOH SHINY!!! And what's worse...somewhere along the line, a large chunk of American decided that was just fine, and wanting anything more was somehow weird, or dangerous, or wrong. And another chunk of people decided that those folks were somehow more real, more authentic, more to be valued, and went on validating them.

If you want an epitaph for the 00's, here it is: this was the decade we let stupidity become a valid lifestyle choice.

Fuck. Is it midnight yet?

...or something. Or in other words, lessons learned by delving through some of my old paperwork of days gone by.

It literally took less than a month at my undergrad school to realize that my biggest need was somewhere to belong, and that it wasn't going to happen there. Inexplicably, I pieced enough together in the first semester (plus Interim term) to get by, which in retrospect was a mistake - my undergrad life was a 747 with three engines on fire plummeting to Earth, but for two years, I was convinced I could put that bird down safe.

After that, I more or less gave up. I spent a lot - a LOT - of time building a mythology around a fictional alternate school, and spun not one but two different class final projects out of it. I was desperately looking for three things: a non-insane girlfriend, a real peer group of friends, and an authentic college experience. You could make a good case that I have now spent exactly twenty years trying to make all three happen at the same time.

Throughout the undergrad years, I am flabbergasted at the number of notes laying out possible combinations of new teams and divisions for pro sports leagues. I distinctly remember noting in 1992 that "every league in North America could easily go to 30-35 teams" and I think it had happened by 2000. And the rules! The endless RPGs, Cyberball, reimaginings of how to render things into a system that would allow me to reproduce and analyze them on paper! What was that about, especially when I couldn't get my head around SPSS and statistical analysis in political science?

In 1994, I knew that politics was turning into a team sport, and that participation was directly proportional to ideology, and that it created a climate of moral imperatives where your opponent was not just misguided, or wrong, but evil and non-negotiable. Nailed it. My professor was amazed at my capacity for sarcasm and vitriol, which I didn't apologize for at all, and wondered whether I might not need to develop my empathy for others. I think that's the part where I point to the DSM-IV and say "Aspergers, son, recognize" but I think I've come around on that some in the last fifteen years. Others may disagree.

Most of all, there was a scene I wrote in those undergrad years where my long-lost fairy godsister gave me the opportunity to go back and reset the clock. It amazed me, because I wrote the same thing six years later and remembered writing that, but not the original one.

And the most telling bit of all - a quote I copied down, from the famous British intelligence officer turned Soviet spy, Kim Philby:

"To betray, you must first belong. I never belonged."

I wrote that down half a life ago. I knew all along. I just didn't realize then that I knew...and I just didn't remember now how much I knew then.

"Stagger Lee was born in February of 1996. After a little over a year at Vanderbilt University, he moved to Washington DC and signed on as tech support for a major non-profit. Seven years later, he moved with his fiancee to California, where he has lived and worked ever since."

Seem like I'm leaving out a lot? Probably. But let's be honest: for most people in my life, that's my story. Anything before I joined a certain listserv during that winter of '96 only exists in my own tales and imagination, because nobody was there to see it and there's precious little physical proof any of it happened - apart from a ring or two and perhaps an old T-shirt or six. And if you're in California, it goes more like:

"Stagger Lee was born in April 2001. His existence did not solidify until July 2004, when he moved to Silicon Valley. He has since bopped around several jobs, leaving a trail of incoherent ramblings about Vanderbilt athletics, tales from his first job, and something about an "EUS" that may or may not have to do with Scottish soccer."

Four years ago, I went home and cleaned out the closet. The result was something of a temporal fugue, where for a span of about three hours, I was back in high school. A little over a year later, I was sent a link to a station of streaming Irish music, which catapulted me back in time seven years in a cloud of snow and pipe smoke. And last week, I opened boxes that carried me from 1985 to 1997 and back, providing me with the most unexpected gift of the year: a treasure-trove of real-time documentation of what I was thinking, what I was obsessing over, how I was living my life - in short, almost all the data points needed to really see what's changed in the last twenty years...and what hasn't.

There are things in my past that were too painful to contemplate, and to get them out of the way, I shut off the past. It didn't keep the actual problems from leaking through, but it did succeed in cutting off large swathes of who I used to be - things that are, or should be, a very big part of who I am today. When they leaked through, it usually only served to trigger the wrong reaction. Memory and regret go together like Jack and Coke, and that's not an idly chosen comparison.

The triumph of 2009 is that a lot of that past broke through in a big way this year, for a number of reasons, and for the most part not in a bad way. Call it the Lion King moment, if you like - "remember who you are." I did. Those things that happened in 1989, or 1994, or 2000 are not things that happened to previous regenerations, played by different people in a different era - they happened to me, they made me what I am, and I still have a lot of those things going for me.

In 2010, I'm not going to be playing defense against my own past anymore. Which should free up a lot of time and energy for other things.