Earlier this week my doctor gave me a new mouthpiece for my nebulizer. Since I’m feeling a bit wheezy and tight this evening, and my regular inhaler didn’t seem to do the trick, I broke out the new mouthpiece and started breathing away. This new mouthpiece has a little rubber valve on the bottom of it that flaps down when I breathe out; this little rubber flap tickles my lower lip, actually. That, and the cloud of medicated steam that arises from the mouthpiece and obscures my vision gives my face a whole set of distractions while I’m writing this entry.

All of a sudden, it’s 2002. Many people are proclaiming 2001 to be one of the worst years in recent history, what with the terrorism and the recession and the war and so on. NPR even played a song called, "Thank God it’s over", and just about every speech and toast that I’ve seen for 2001 has made a point of saying something like, "Thank God that year’s over."

In the grand scheme of things, perhaps this year was worse than others, but I really don’t think it was all that bad. Here’s a pro/con chart of 2001 for me:

Is it selfish for me to say that, on the whole, this was a pretty good year for me? It’s not that I’m insensitive to the tragic events of September 11 and to the lives of those who were forever altered by them. But I also don’t want to minimize the importance of the good things that happened to me. In the future, I want to remember 2001 primarily as being the year in which I married Jennifer, not the year in which tragedy struck and war began.

Getting laid off from my company was a mixed blessing. On the one hand, I was starting to feel very frustrated there; I was doing web development, which I enjoy, but I was only doing front end work, which I find frustrating after a time when I really want to code PHP and Perl and build back end software. It was also hard for me to figure out who was benefitting from my work besides the company; after all, as far as I could tell, our product had very little actual usage. I’ve kept in touch with former co-workers that I liked and that I’d become friends with; and something tells me that, in a way, I’m kind of lucky that I got laid off when I did. And getting laid off gave me a chance to go back and look at some other things that I want to do with my life, and with Jennifer’s support I’m starting up classes at a community college in bonehead chemistry and math to begin the long road towards becoming an ecosystems engineer (while continuing to look for new work; I’m not slacking off there, but I am primarily considering contract and part time work now, not full time work). This has been a good thing. I still enjoy web development and programming, and I think that the future holds bioinformatics applied to ecosystems for me.

As for New Year’s resolutions; well, I admit that I don’t really make them anymore. I decided several years ago that January 1 was as arbitrary a date as any for making global life changes, so I figured I’d make March 25 resolutions instead. But, really, I don’t actually see a need to make any resolutions, whether for the new year or even for March 25. I’m pretty happy with the person that I am, I’m pretty happy with the direction that I’m going in. Many years ago I set out some goals for myself, for the person that I want to become and the things that I want to accomplish. I’ve achieved many of those goals, I’ve set some new ones, and I’m well on my way to accomplishing many of the other goals. So I guess I have to say that the only resolution I want to make is to stay the course.

Some of you had a good 2001, some of you had a really bad one. All of us were deeply affected by the events of September and October. While we shouldn’t forget or minimize tragedy, we should also not dishonor the good things that happened to us as well.

Have a healthy and prosperous 2002.