2013
It’s late on New Year’s Eve, and what have I to do but to write a catalogue and hope that’s sufficient? It’s more than I managed for 2012, anyway.
I will remember 2013 as a year of animal upheaval. When the year began, the household included a dog, Newton, whose sphere was increasingly shrinking as Gabriel’s sphere grew. When the year ended, Newton was gone—back in Arkansas and, by all reports, happily reliving his youth as a forest dog in the Ozarks—replaced by Crabapple, a ghost-striped black kitten we found in a tree at the Iowa State Fair. 
The trade was unintentional; we had no plans to replace Newton at all, and even today we all miss him dearly. All, that is, except Jane and especially Mr. Bingley, who never enjoyed his company. Bingley does enjoy Crabapple’s, however. It’s a common sight these days to find them snuggling together on the back of the sofa.
In 2013, Kathy and I both changed our professional identities. I started a new editorial position in late June, and she started her new position in November. Both changes appear (knock on wood) good. I had fewer freelance editorial clients than last year, but I had more long-term clients. Freelance projects I worked on were as diverse as they were interesting: dissertations, press releases, plays, and grant applications—all enough to make me occasionally dream of freelancing full-time. Someday.
As a two-to-three-year-old should, Gabriel changed the most among us. A late talker,1 he started 2013 with a rudimentary vocabulary. Indeed, we spent this past Sunday night with Laura and not yet two-year-old Peter, and his expressive speech is typical for his age: a strong enough vocabulary to place him on the cusp of speaking short sentences—about where Gabriel was in November/December 2012, five to six months after he turned two. No, really, hear for yourself:
- One year ago, he was excited to get a new bed.
- In March, he helped us read books.
- By the end of November, he was telling us stories.
I know every kid goes through similar progressions in language development. Even so, listening to those recordings in succession astonishes me. The gulfs between the first and the second and the second and the third seem so wide, it’s a wonder anyone crosses them.2
But for the most part, here at the end of the year, Gabriel is the kid he ought to be: bossy and selfish, sweet and surprising. Who he will be this time next year is probably just as hidden to me now as who he is now was hidden to me a year ago.
Art time with markers, glue, and several kinds of stickers.
Though probably destined for the cutting-room floor in any longform recap of my life, on my mind here at the end of 2013 has been my Internet social life and death. Namely, I quit Facebook. Certainly I was already falling pray to algorithm rot because I wasn’t willing to give the site the unambiguous, authentic clicks it needed to maintain a stream of news and photos that would probabilistically keep me invested. I had long even felt obliged to maintain a Facebook account, but contrary to most users’ feelings it, so much news about friends and family absent intimacy with them just exposed how little value I found the site. Perhaps Grandma will be sad not to see my photos and videos so easily (if the algorithms pushed them to her); perhaps old friends I messaged now and again will be momentarily confused when they try to send something. But I want to be a person who can throw away something that isn’t valuable and hold tight to something that is. Facebook was too much the former to justify my giving it any more time.3
There is little else of note to say of 2013. It had its share of bruises, among them:
- It was a year of reading friends’ books but neglecting to tell them I read their books (I did) or admitting how much I liked them (a lot).
- It was a year of not reading much else than the above.
- It was a year of little to no creative work on my part.
- It was a year of late nights (like this one) and early mornings.
- It was a year of poor dietary habits and too little exercise.
- It was a year of more inwardness than not.
All of these I hope to rectify or otherwise improve upon in 2014.
1 Late talking is possibly another effect of prematurity.
2 He’s the same kid, though. I don’t think he realizes he does it, but Gabriel still flicks his tongue in his mouth the way he does in the March video.
3 In the more than ten years my Internet has been wider than email and maybe a message board, I’ve made new friends on two platforms: “blogs“—and everything they meant from 2002 to about 2007—and Twitter.
