I've missed the boat.

I woke up on NYE fully intending to write. Instead, I watched football. In the words of Regina Spektor, this is after all "Uh-Merica." (But the Chiefs ARE in the playoffs, hot damn!)

Perhaps this vignette is indicative of my 2006: paving the road to hell with my intentions, whether good or bad. I finally sat down two nights ago and took 20 minutes to make a catalogue of the year. For my own personal benefit, for prosperity's sake, for the sheer exercise of pen on legal pad. It seems to me that many of my friends took time at the end of the year to review its passing.

This catalogue is pretty boring, but much more full than I expected. I divided the year by its months, and watched the names affecting each month change. I shudder to think about what I left out.

The thing that interests me most is whether or not I'm the same person as I was at this time one year ago. Obviously, that's physically impossible: people shed 7 layers of skin each day. Think of the regeneration involved. In looking at my catalogue, I realized that I had accomplished a lot last year: I changed jobs, I bought my first car, I moved out of my parents' home. These are the tangible, financial-type growths. These are the proof that I am out there, I am succeeding, I am doing something productive with myself. There's no tangible way to show that I think about breathing in a different way, that I value more time to myself, that I try to read a book once in awhile instead of succumbing to numbing TV.

Things like that accumulate sneakily, like feelings. Can they be qualified to 2006? Not really. But it's nice to know that, over the span of 12 months, things change. I'm banking on that for the next 12 months...