My Year in Review

Every December, after the spending frenzy of Christmas is over, and before the New Year, we are all subjected to innumerable year end lists. Best and Worst dressed, biggest news story, a recap of all the celebrity deaths over the past year, the political and celebrity scandals and divorces that made the news that year. Each of these stories is scaffolded by individual stories of people and how the year has played out for them. Here is the story of my year.

In January, after having lived in Dallas for 15 years, I moved back to Commerce (ironically, where I moved to Dallas from in 1996) so I could take a job as the Assistant Director of the Writing Center at Texas A&M-Commerce. Living in Commerce has been a mixture of good and bad. The good: the commute is very short, the rent is very cheap so I don't have to have a second job to make ends meet. The bad: Commerce itself, the AA meetings here are filled with people who are only there to get their papers signed and who double share. Yet, there is a certain symmetry in moving back to finish a degree at a school I left for all the wrong reasons fifteen years ago. After having lived in Dallas so long, it was difficult to move back to a small town, especially one like Commerce. One would think that a college town would be fun, but Commerce certainly is not like any college town I've ever lived in. The natives seem to do everything they can to keep the town from being a "college town" i.e. a liberal town. As I have said, the gene pool in Commerce is very shallow. But nothing lasts forever, and the end of my time here is in sight. I'm hoping to move back to Dallas in the Fall (or summer if I'm lucky).

I don't really believe in the whole "bucket list" idea, but I did do something in May that I have been wanting to do for years, I drove to California. A friend of mine was moving there and needed someone to drive one of his cars out there with him. So during the break in May, I drove a Mercedes SUV (what an amazing car!) to Palm Springs. I absolutely loved Palm Springs and would like to go back and hang out for a longer time. While I was there I had a sort of break down/break through. I have this huge problem with feeling inadequate, especially when I'm around people who seem to have a lot of self confidence. I used to be more confident; I don't really know what happened. But I decided to go back into therapy after that so that was a good thing.

I turned 45 this year...so if I live to be as old as my Dad was when he died at 83, I'm more than halfway through my life. I have decided that I want to make the last half of my life count for something. I don't want to spend the rest of my time either trying to relive the past or engage in unrealistic dreams about the future. I want to get back some of that confidence I used to have back in the day.

In September, I bought another car (which makes about the 18th car I've had since I was 15) because the lease on my VW is up in 2012. I have always loved old Mercedes Benz, and I found a great deal on a 1984 300D turbo...this is the second one of these I've had...

I've decided to get back into the dating scene...although that's a dicey prospect when I live in Commerce...too many closet cases out here. Part of what I want for the second half of my life is to find people to date...and possibly someone to marry...although, as Bruce Horton says, it's difficult to get a boyfriend after you have 10+ years sober because you're no longer so co-dependent. I totally get that.

I didn't hate Christmas as much this year as in the past. It seemed to come and go quite quickly. I will probably never like it as much as my friend Greg does, or as much as I did even at one time. Christmas is for kids, and it was fun watching my niece and nephews enjoy it so much.

So looking forward to this year, in January I will have been sober 15 years, I plan to move back to Dallas where all my friends are. I'm working on self-publishing a collection of my KERA essays on Amazon. I am cultivating new friendships and trying not to be too dependent on two or three people for my self esteem. And I'm looking forward to completing the coursework for my PhD this summer, take my exams in the fall, and defend my dissertation proposal next spring. I'm so ready to be finished and for the next chapter of my life to begin.

Lone Star Nutrition

So I was at the grocery store last night, buying the vegetables and fruit for my juicing, and in front of me in line was a couple buying prepared fried foods (like a container full of chicken nuggets, a box of chicken, french fries, a bottle of coke. Together they probably weighed 500 lbs. The woman could barely walk her thighs were so big. They paid with a Lone Star card, which for those of you who don't live in Texas, is a food stamps card. I kept thinking how wonderful it would be if the state would give nutrition classes for people who get Lone Star cards to encourage them to eat healthy. For the amount of money they spent on that junk food they could have bought at least two or three days worth of healthy food. Of course, the liberal in me thinks that we shouldn't decide for people what they eat, but the human in me hates to see people killing themselves with the food they eat. Even when I am not eating great, I don't eat like that...anyway, considering the fact that Texas is in a huge financial hole I doubt the nutrition of poor people is on the minds of the state legislators.

Plans for the Holiday

So one of the reasons I have chosen to teach college is because I get a month off at Christmas and a month off in May/June. In reality, because I will probably be working some next week, and the second week of January will be when we're gearing up for the next semester, I actually have about 2 weeks off. Other than catching up on bad TV (actually, that's a lie because I watch bad TV even during school) I have a list of things I am going to do this break...

Learn how to knit. I don't know why I feel the need to knit, mainly it's because I want to have something to do with my hands while I'm doing other things because I'm obsessive compulsive and other than being on my phone all the time. One of my former teachers here in Commerce is going to give me lessons and i'm super excited...

Catch up on my reading. I have already bought three books I'm planning on reading while i'm off. Tinsel by Hank Stuever about the commercialization of Christmas and focused on the town of Frisco where my sister lives (plus Hank Steuver is hot and I am going to cyber stalk him a little bit). Freedom by Jonathan Franzen. I'm not a huge Franzen fan but I heard an interview with him about the book on Fresh Air a couple of months ago and it sounded really good. And Middlemarch because I have a standing tradition of reading that book every year...usually I read it in August but I didn't have time this August.

Upload a collection of my essays to Amazon. I've been working on a group of my commentaries from KERA, writing introductions that provide a bit of context and describe how my views have changed from when I wrote it originally. I love the idea of self-publishing on Amazon...I'm hoping maybe if I get good response from this it will give me the impetus to actually write a book...and of course I'm always hoping I will be "discovered."

Re-Write my CV and teaching philosophy. I'm desperate to get out of Commerce when my time as Assistant Director of the Writing Center is over. I'm hoping to teach at SMU as a lecturer or one of the community colleges in Dallas, somewhere I can work in addition to my work at TAMU-C so I won't have to work at the Pottery Barn again, although I'm not too good to do that again either!!

Clean my house top to bottom and edit my clothes. I need to totally clean, rearrange my house and get rid of some stuff in my house...

My friend Greg said don't forget to breathe...

Khloe is Koming to Town

Dallas is all a flutter with the news that Lamar Odom, better known as the other half of Khloe and Lamar on the E-Network, are coming to town. The Dallas Morning News blogger Rand Duren misquoted some of her Tweets saying she was not thrilled but not about the move, when actually her tweet was about the new Twitter format. Way to excel at journalism DMN. Then some fashion blogger from the same paper, Kyle Kearbey (where do these people get these names?) asks the pressing questions of whether now that Khole with a K is coming to town, will Dallas get a DASH store? I asked the same question on my Facebook page, but as a joke, because I couldn't imagine anything Dallas needs less than another store to sell clothes from a bunch of fat gypsies. All this brouhaha about a family whose only claim to fame is that one of their family members took it from behind on a video tape...oh, and their father hid O.J.'s bloody clothes in that Louis Vuittion suitcase he carried out of the house that day.

These women have no discernible talent, have done nothing for the world except try to make a buck out of being famous for being famous, and, from watching their show, have notoriously bad taste in men (except maybe for Khloe, because Lamar does seem like a nice enough guy and pretty level headed considering what he married into). The whole Kardashian phenom has just been so blown out of proportion, ending in the hopefully shark jumping 72 day sham marriage of Kim to Kris Humphries. One can only hope that the Kim-Kris show is the beginning of the end of this "empire."

I don't hate Khloe Kardashian-Odom; I hate the idea of Khloe Kardashian. While other actors struggle to make ends meet, these reality show "stars" shoot to the top of the A-list and make millions of dollars just for showing up at clubs and by putting their name on a perfume. They perpetuate the myth that with the right sort of marketing, the right clothes, the right friends, one can become rich, and more importantly, famous. Few people begrudge people like George Clooney or Brad Pitt or even Angelina Jolie with her wife stealing, blood vial wearing ways, their fame because they are also (except perhaps for Ms. Jolie) talented. They have a certain degree of talent that they have parlayed into fame and fortune, and more importantly, they use that fame to help others. The sort of breathless wonderment that writers, including the ones mentioned above, focus on these ragtag people only feeds into their inherent narcissism.

One can only hope that Khloe won't spend much time in Dallas and that we won't have to see her and her bootylicious sisters around town. Because all Dallas needs is another group of people who are all hat and no cattle.

the Diana Chronicles

Just finished reading Tina Brown's The Diana Chronicles last night...such a good book. But I kept wondering, just as I did in April when they got married, what Diana really would have thought about Kate Middleton? I would like to think she would have liked it, but after reading how she was manipulative and jealous, I wonder if she would have, at 50 years old, have been jealous of her younger beautiful daughter in law. How would she have felt about her son focusing on another woman other than her...anyway, that's what I think about when I"m not in school

Pecan Horders

So outside the building I work in here in Commerce, there are several pecan trees. Because the school spent thousands of dollars this summer installing a sprinkler system in the lawn outside, these trees have been watered all summer and the pecans that have been falling from them are HUGE! Because I've been toying with this raw food detox diet, and part of that diet includes recipes where you can use pecans, I decided to start picking them up...I eventually got about 7 pounds of pecans!~ I was super excited given how expensive pecans are in the store.

Then the pecan hoarders started showing up outside the building. At first it was this little old man with a plastic grocery stack who was obviously just getting a few pecans for him and his little wife to make pecan pies with. Then the people with long poles to knock the pecans out of the trees and buckets to put them in started showing up! They were stealing my pecans!

All this reminded me of my grandmother. She had this huge pecan tree in her back yard when we were growing up. In the 90's, when she started showing more signs of her Alzheimer's, she called my Mom one day and said that my brother, his wife, and "That Mexican" were on her roof stealing her pecans. It really upset her! We were able to talk her out of calling the police, and my Dad and the man who worked for him had been up there picking up pecans, but no one had been on her roof. It's become a sort of shorthand in our family when we say "They're stealing our pecans!"

Not long after that incident, my parents went to the Lion's club stew. They were going to bring my grandmother a bowl of stew and a piece of pie. As my Mom picked up a piece of pecan pie, my dad said, "Are you sure you want to bring her a piece of pecan pie?" I think she ended up getting buttermilk...we didn't want to start all that up again!!