2022 Archives - Page 2 of 2 - Ramblin' with Roger

This was the year that was

Democracy

It’s time for my annual look back at the year that was. The questions were stolen from Kelly because why not?

Did you keep your New Years’ resolutions, and will you make more for next year?

To part one, not so much if I made them, which I may or may not have. Regardless, the list of things I want to finish, if anything, has gotten longer. So making more of them would be foolhardy.

Did anyone close to you give birth?

Someone named in part after me had a third child

Did anyone close to you die?

Four people were in the choir: Betty, Mike, Nate, and Susan. Ken, Jim, Paul, Mary, and Kay. I never mentioned my wife’s aunt Effie Oliver, who I was very fond of. Nor did I discuss my father’s favorite cousin Sheldon Walker. I feel as though I have forgotten someone.

What countries did you visit?

None. Maybe in 2023.

What would you like to have in 2023 that you lacked in 2022?

This is what Kelly wrote last year. “An end to the pandemic, and a feeling that my country is moving toward rationality and a renewed commitment to thinking collectively and valuing democracy.” I’ll still buy that.

What was your biggest achievement of the year?

I didn’t get as detailed about how sick my wife had been in October, though I wrote about it in two posts. Anyway, taking care of her – changing bandages, making meals, whatever. My MIL is pleased with how well I cared for her daughter, so that’s nice.

What was your biggest failure?

I think not getting to the genealogy stuff.

What was the best thing you bought?

A portable white noise machine.

Meritorious

timemagazinepersonofyear2022

Whose behavior merited celebration?

Anyone who tried to protect democracy. The Jan 6 committee. Librarians.

Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?

The Supreme Court. Most federal Republicans. The newly re-elected governor Ron DeSantis (R-FL). I could name LOTS of names, but I don’t have the energy. But I will select one: Lindsay Graham, a spineless worm. (Or is that an insult to worms?)

Where did most of your money go?

My daughter has gone to college.

What did you get really excited about?

Singing in the choir. Albany was COVID-green far too infrequently, but I relished it every week.

Compared to this time last year, are you happier or sadder?

I’m working on this apparently popular theory that you can fake it until you make it. So I’m working on at least pretending to get happier, even though it feels… wrong.

Richer or poorer?

My daughter is going to college.

What do you wish you’d done more of?

Reading more books: I read stuff online, in magazines, and newspapers, but books fall by the wayside. Also, taking more naps.

What do you wish you’d done less of?

Deleting political emails because I’m always inundated.

How did you spend Christmas?

With my MIL, eventually.

Did you fall in love in 2022?

Yes, actually

How many one-night stands?

Same as last year

Television?

What was your favorite TV program?

I’ve watched almost no television except Abbott Elementary, The Good Doctor, JEOPARDY!, and news programs. No time.

Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?

If that one guy would just GO AWAY…

What was the best book you read?

How To Be An Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi, which had sat on my shelf for a few years.

What did you want and get?

A Democratic US Senate

What did you want and not get?

A Democratic US House of Representatives, not that I was expecting one.

What were your favorite films of this year?

I have a difficult time seeing films on TV or the computer. That said, I’d pick CODA. I did see and enjoyed SPIDER-MAN: NO WAY HOME, She Said, and Devotion at the cinema.

What did you do on your birthday?

It was a Monday. Optimally, as little as possible. I really don’t remember. I probably wrote a blog post.

How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2021?

Comfortable.

Assuming facts not in evidence

What kept you sane?

Music, always. Also, this here blog and the interactions it’s led to.

Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?

Volodymyr Zelenskyy, President of Ukraine. Rightly the TIME Magazine Person of the Year, though, as someone said, the cover looked like something designed for an MCU poster.
Nancy Pelosi. Wrangling a herd of cats is not easy. I saw Paul Ryan, one of her predecessors as Speaker of the House, on ABC News acknowledge that she did a good job, though he disagreed about her priorities.
Taylor Swift. I only have two of her albums, but she markets herself very well and uses her power for good, not evil.

What political issue stirred you the most?

The threat to democracy itself. And it’s not just in the United States. The attempted coup in Germany, the retrograde leadership in Hungary, and the chunk of votes that Marine Le Pen got in the last French elections.

Related, the power of the lie and the astonishing willingness of some people to believe it.

Who did you miss?

The weird thing even now is that you don’t see folks. Several people from my church are still attending online.

Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2022:

For me, in-person is SO much better. Better than plays online, ZOOM meetings, et al.

Sunday Stealing: Last year I …

STILL liminal

Once again, I’m doing the Sunday Stealing, Last year, I… This is even though some of the questions are similar to the Sedingerian quiz I’m mostly posting tomorrow. You can compare and contrast my answers!

What song will always remind you of last year? Doesn’t have to be a song released last year.

Running Up That Hill by Kate Bush. It recharted last year in the UK because of the program Stranger Things, which, BTW, I have never watched and don’t even know what platform it’s on. But I have heard it more often than ever since nearly four decades ago.

What do you wish you would have done more of?

Work on genealogy. I discovered that someone had posted on their family tree on Ancestry the purported parents of my great-grandfather, Samuel Walker, who I vaguely remember. But I don’t think this citation is correct because the demographics don’t work.

What do you wish you would have done less of?

Looking at the weekly COVID designation for my county. By the way, I swear Albany County and adjacent Rensselaer County were in lockstep regarding their COVID status for the entire year. It wasn’t true of other counties in the metro, such as Schenectady and Saratoga.

What was your favorite new TV program? Movie? Album/Songs? Or if you didn’t pick up any new ones, what are you still watching/listening to? Any recommendations?

Definitely no new TV program. I liked the new Puss In Boots movie I saw this week. Here is some music; I’d pick the new/old Sinatra album.

Too long ago

What did you do on your birthday and how old were you? Did you feel differently?

I have no idea what I did on my birthday. I was some multiple of 23; no, I didn’t feel particularly different.

What political or social issue stirred you the most?

The Supreme Court overturned women’s right to choose what they do with their bodies and the subsequent draconian laws passed by states.

Who was the most interesting new person you met?

Someone I talked with at the library gala.

What changed at your job?

The great thing about retirement is that I don’t have to think about that.

What changed in your home?

My daughter went to college.

Describe how a relationship changed.

My daughter went to college.

Do you think you are still the same person that you were at the beginning of the year? How so?

Goodness, I hope not. If you’re not learning, you’re not living.

Summarize the year in three words or less. Bonus points for doing it in one word. Explain.

Liminal. It is a word that one of my pastors used in sermons at least twice. I mentioned this here. “Liminal ” comes from the Latin root, limen, which means “threshold.” The liminal space is the “crossing over” space – a space where you have left something behind, yet you are not yet fully in something else.

The year is ending at Sunday Stealing

human contact

This Sunday Stealing is The year is ending. I have a ritual closer to New Year’s Day. But it doesn’t preclude trying these on for size.

1. Wintertime comfort foods, habits, hobbies

At least once a year, I make lasagna. At least two of them because it’s less labor-intensive. I’ll do that for sure. I hate turning on the oven when it’s warm, but I LOVE doing so when it’s cold. Using the same Betty Crocker recipe, I have to adjust the quantities. It’s because of what has been annoying-labeled shrinkflation, though it’s been happening for decades. Thus, my 32-ounce cans of tomatoes are only 28 ounces.

2. Favorite seasonal/holiday music and songs

This List from four years ago will do.

3. The people I want to spend more time with next year

I hope that some folks who stopped attending church because of the pandemic – the service is on Facebook – will feel comfortable enough to return to in-person services.

4. How much I could change my life in 1 year if I focused

One can always pick one thing to do; I might pick working more on genealogy. But this would inevitably mean NOT doing something else, and I’m unwilling to unbalance myself in that way.

5. The valuable lessons I learned this year

I need human contact! One example: we had been doing church remotely from March 2020 to June 2021. Getting back together was a joyous occasion, and I never attended remote church again if I were in town unless I was sick.

Then in January 2022, because of a local surge of COVID, we went back to remote only. I HATED, HATED, HATED it. I couldn’t focus on the sermon. When we were back in person about a month later, it was such a relief.

This year

6. How I’d describe 2022 in 10 words

Daughter’s College; wife’s leg infection; COVID for three; Wordle streak.

7. My favorite Reads of 2022

I have an online subscription to the New York Times. It’s currently $4 a month. I’m enjoying it immensely. I used to read the newspaper daily in the late 1970s and 1980s but shifted to just the Sunday paper. Then it fell off the list.

8. Best movies I saw in 2022

I’m still contemplating this. But the two films I most enjoyed in a movie theater in 2022 were The Wizard of Oz, which I’d seen many times on TV; and Cabaret, which I had not watched in a half-century.

9. Favorite TV shows/episodes of 2022

This will sound snarky, but it is not intended as such. Watching the game show JEOPARDY, I always root for the so-called “super champions,” who have won ten or more games, to lose. To paraphrase Hawkeye Pierce on an episode of M*A*S*H, “I want someone else!”

Highlights

10. Memorable experiences from 2022

Going to Carnegie Hall with my daughter. Lots of live theater in the summer. Seeing, at different times, two of my oldest friends, who I first met in kindergarten. My sister’s high school reunion, with such a gracious host putting us up.

11. Three people I enjoyed spending time with this year

Uthaclena; Lee; Bruce.

12. How I handled challenges this year

With aplomb, of course.

Actually, new stuff usually makes me initially grumpy. Then, eventually, I discovered it’s not so bad, and I’m pretty good at it.

13. What I’m leaving behind in 2022

COVID. (From my lips to God’s ears.) I did receive the bivalent shot targeted at Omicron last week. I’ve never had any reaction to the vaccines other than a sore arm at the injection site.

14. How I changed most from the beginning to the end of the year

Perhaps a soupçon more optimistic

15. What I want to tell myself before the New Year

There are no federal or statewide elections this year. My email box should be far less crowded.

Also, when in doubt, eat applesauce.

Nobody claim 2022 as “your year”

please don’t suck

2022 as A friend of mine posted this graphic on their Facebook feed. Nobody claim 2022 as “your year”. And I get it.

I got to sing in my church’s Christmas Eve service for the first time in two years, which was great. Now, I felt rusty but that was OK. In 2020, the church had audio and video of the choir’s prior performances shown on the Facebook feed. Listening to the sounds of our voices was OK; I’d been doing so almost every week for months of the regular service. but watching the film of me, and others, singing made me EXTREMELY melancholy.

The Boston Globe readers commented on the past year. The intro: “If 2020 felt like a year like no other, then 2021 felt like more of the same. One step forward and two steps back, or vice versa? It depended on the day. We saw vaccines rolled out, then resisted. Bitter partisanship kept its grip on our politics.”

I love the word hegemony

If I read this article, The Respite Is Coming to an End. “All around us we can see the forces of white nationalist authoritarianism engaged in a second, far more methodical, far better coordinated, and already more successful attempt to do what they failed to do on January 6, 2021. If matters continue on this path, the Biden administration will prove only a brief respite before those forces snuff out the grand American experiment and secure a permanent, counter-majoritarian chokehold on the erstwhile republic.” And it’s a compelling argument.

And Foreign Affairs had a piece, The Real Crisis of Global Order. Illiberalism on the Rise. It addresses, among other things, the collapse of US hegemony, which Trump’s election helped to create and Biden’s election almost certainly can’t fix. For instance, as the Daily Show illustrated, Why China Is in Africa.

Rodgers and Hammerstein

I’m already exhausted from 2022, like Sinatra or Gordon MacRae singing Soliloquy from Carousel, musing what “my boy Bill” will be like. “Say, why am I carrying on like this? My kid ain’t even been born yet.” And neither has 2022. Well, maybe in New Zealand.

Perhaps I need more humour and a stiff upper lip, like Queen Elizabeth who lost her husband, Prince Philip, in 2021, who she’d only been married to since 1947, before I was born.

So I’m going to decide that 2022 will be great! Of course, I will also retreat to the ‘trust but verify” position about the new year, which is a quote Ronald Reagan cleverly pilfered.