Wrapping up 2006, Looking ahead to 2007

I spent one of the best New Year's Eves I've ever spent this year. Bobbie and I went to a double feature of Children of Men and Charlotte's Web at The Grove (Man, that place is hilarious. It's like Disneyland made up of stores. A consumerist nightmare!), then came home, ordered pizza, and watched all of Kill Bill, drank some champagne (left over from the holiday party), and then watched the Kennedy Center Honors awarding the Mark Twain Prize to Steve Martin on PBS. It was a nice, mellow way to ring in the new year, and the next day I made black eyed peas and turnip greens myself (along with biscuits and gravy), because the soul food place in Pasadena we usually go to on New Year's Day went out of business.

I've been working over the last 3 years or so at being more goal-oriented, including making a series of goals and resolutions at the beginning of the year, and it's been working out well for me. I can say that my life has improved greatly since I started doing this. Last year on the blog, I did a little point-by-point evaluation of how I had lived up to my resolutions from the year before, then laid out resolutions for the following year. This year, things didn't progress in quite the linear fashion that they had in the past. My life took some surprising turns over the year, so my goals had to adapt. Thus, it doesn't really make sense to do the same thing this year. But a more general summation of the year is in order.

First of all, I really enjoy having this blog. Even if nobody read it, I'd be happy with it. I've tried to keep journals throughout my life, and I've never been very good at it. For some reason, I'm able to respond to the "pressure" of posting on a blog everyday. I like that it keeps me writing, working those creative muscles, and I think my writing has improved greatly over the last few years that I've had this resource.

This summer, my friends Charlie and George invited me to write for their movie blog, The Fake Life, and I'll take this moment to thank them for extending this opportunity to me. I've immensely enjoyed writing for the site, and it's made me more active in watching and paying attention to movies, and provided me with both an outlet and a bit of a portfolio for my writing. Thanks, guys.

I had planned to be teaching ESL full-time by the end of the year. I did serve a week as a substitute at a night school in South Central, and it was a satisfying experience, but I haven't pursued it past that. Maybe I'll get a little deeper into it this year.

I'd been riding my bike to work pretty frequently, but then I fell off on it when the weather turned cold. It's hard to force yourself to ride a bike for a mile in freezingcold weather at 8 in the morning.

I set myself the goal of reading 12 books through the year, and pretty much accomplished that goal. If I haven't been reading as much lately, it's because I've been spending more time writing, which is probably a better use of my time. Books I read from start to finish in 2006:

Can't Stop Won't Stop by Jeff Chang
Central Avenue Sounds by Clora Bryant et al
The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon (which I may reread this year)
A Deadly Shade of Gold by John D. MacDonald
Pale Orange for the Shroud by John D. MacDonald
Heaven's Prisoners by James Lee Burke
The Killing Bone by Peter Saxon
The Big Nowhere by James Ellroy
The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester
I Am Legend (plus Witch War) by Richard Matheson
From Hell by Alan Moore (I wasn't going to count comics on this list, but I think I can make an exception for this big-ass book)
Please Kill Me by Legs McNeil
Our Band Could Be Your Life by Michael Azzerad(skipped the chapters on Mission of Burma and Dinosaur Jr. I like both bands, but neither is really one of "my bands," you know? It's funny, because I don't like Minor Threat that much, but they cast such a big shadow over my teen years that they almost are one of "my bands" by default)

I haven't been able to finish anything this month. I started reading an Orson Welles biography by Charles Higham, then got bored and started on Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 50's and 60's by Gerald Nachman, but didn't get very far in that, and ended up going back to the Orson Welles book (which I'm currently around page 200 of). Other books partially read in 2006:

Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs (finally went back and finished the last 50 pages)
Last Call by Tim Powers (started this last year, but got interrupted, so finished it this year)

Books listened to on CD:

The DaVinci Code (Dan Brown is a really, really awful writer, although I can see why most people who haven't read Holy Blood Holy Grail, Illuminatus! or Foucault's Pendulum would find the story interesting)
The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels
I started listening to Will in the Wold by Peter Greenblatt, but got bored with it.

I finished Book I of Finnegan's Wake, took most of the summer off from it, then finished Book II, Chapter 1 just before the end of the year, although I have to admit that I understood very little of Book II. On the first day of the new year, I picked it up and started reading Book II, Chapter 2, and realized I had no desire to continue. I may go back to it sometime, but for now, I can be content with the knowledge that I have finished more of the book than 95% of English Majors have. Maybe I'll start on Moby Dick next.

Didn't buy a lot of CD's this year. I got the new Beck CD, and a couple others that I can't remember right now, but I did join emusic, which is just the greatest thing since sliced bread. So, just to be OCD, here's a list of full albums I downloaded from emusic in 2006 (and the first days of 2007):

Aesop Rock - Fast Cars, Danger, Fire and Knives
Beat Happening - Jamboree
Boogie Down Productions - Criminal Minded
Busdriver - Fear of a Black Tangent
Cannibal Ox - The Cold Vein
Cornelius - Point
Daedelus - Exquisite Corpse
Deerhoof - The Runners Four
Deerhoof - +81
Foetus - Hole
Funkadelic - Funkadelic
Funkadelic - Free Your Mind and Your Ass Will Follow
Funkadelic - Standing on the Verge of Getting It On
Funkadelic - America Eats Its Young
Geza X - You Goddamn Kids
Guided By Voices - Bee Thousand
Lord Buckley - A Most Immaculately Hip Aristocrat
The Minutemen - What Makes A Man Start Fires?
The Minutemen - Buzz or Howl Under the Influence of Heat
The Minutemen - Project Mersh
The Nip Drivers - Destroy Whitey
Oliver Nelson - Afro-American Sketches
The Pharaohs - Awakening
The Pharaohs - In The Basement
Quantic - An Announcement to Answer
Rites of Spring - End on End
Rodan - Rusty
Sleater-Kinney - Dig Me Out
Sleater-Kinney - All Hands on the Bad One
The Congos - Heart of the Congos
The Freeze - Land of the Lost
The Residents - Meet the Residents
Tom Waits - Orphans (only disc one so far)
v/a - Bay Area Funk, Vol. 2

Plus a whole bunch of individual songs by Half Japanese, Soundgarden, Minor Threat, Egghunt, Ike and Tina, Culture, Frank Zappa, Camper Van Beethoven, Charlie Rich and who knows who else.

Goals and Resolutions for 2007:

1. Get a vasectomy. Call Kaiser next week for an appointment.
2. Write, write, write.
3. Send resume out to all nearby schools for teaching position.
4. Bike to work as often as possible, and bike on the weekends.
5. Read 12 books over the course of the year.
6. Play guitar every day.

I have some other projects lined up that could turn out to be very interesting, including a new column that will be debuting at The Fake Life this month, but I don't want to say to much on any of that yet. Stay tuned!