It's time for an update. Sigh.
Year of Planned Reading. Geez, I've come off the rails. I've been reading like there's no tomorrow -- with a new twist: I've discovered the Books on CD section of the college library, so I've managed to consume four additional stories while cooking, driving, and painting the house. On top of, I don't know, a couple of dozen that I've read since I posted last. But the Planned part of this resolution is in tatters. I go to the library with a call number scrawled on a post-it note and emerge with an armload of books, including five nonfictions from the shelf beside whatever I went in there for, a heap of novels that caught my eye, and whatever covers looked good in the "New Acquisitions" section. I'm gobbling novels, everything from Charles Dickens to Stephen King, Iris Murdoch to Candace Bushnell. I'm thinking a lot about story. This is not news. I am always, always, thinking about story.
Year of Shakespeare. Still no reading chair, so no progress on this. I almost bought a rocking chair at a used furniture store, but when I went back it was gone. The latest book on CD is Shakespeare, and I'm feeling the urge to start up again. I've got plenty of time still.
Year of the Cure. I still have not cured Crohn's disease. I have not even mobilized the smart readers who said they would help me build a tool for patients like me who need to track changes in our poop. My sense of mission has stalled a little bit. This is because I am being reasonably compliant about my medication and my symptoms are greatly reduced. Then what happens is I forget that I have the disease, and stop taking my medication, and the symptoms come back. I have abandoned the grain-free, dairy-free, gluten-free, sugar-free diet, because there were no noticeable changes to my symptoms under that regime, and it was a heck of a hassle. I'm a little bit ashamed of this. Should I make it my mission to eradicate this disease? Or should I just make it my mission to take my medication stringently, and set my mission on something more aligned with my particular skills? Like teaching some more folks to sail? Or reading a few more novels? Or drinking gin and tonics in the backyard with the dogs sleeping at my feet?
Today I am sort of morosely thinking about my lack of ambition, and my stalled progress even in these 3 very modest goals. I am thinking about it because of the Sotomayor hearings, of all things, where a woman who lived downstairs from me when I was a freshman in college is now a bigwig conservative legal thinker. And I am not.
Not that I wish to be. But from time to time the distinguished, flourishing careers of my former peers stop me and make me feel bad about myself. What have I been doing while she's been becoming a nationally-renowned expert? Well. There are some dogs whose lives have been enriched by my affection. Some people can make sailboats go a little bit faster. The sky and the air and the smell and the feel of water and wind and mud and snow, those things have been observed and appreciated more than if I'd been inside producing legal scholarship. But the Senate does not need me, and I cannot imagine that it ever will.