Monday, January 05, 2004
(7:22 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
A curious incident
Today, for the first time in all my twenty-three years, I did not mess up the year, writing "03" instead of "04." I wrote the date hundreds of time during the course of my workday, and only in a couple very specific incidents did I make that mistake. This is a curious incident in the Sherlock Holmesian sense of the word, strange for what didn't happen, like the dog who didn't bark in the night. Generally, if we are to give Freud the benefit of the doubt, we might expect people to make the "mistake" of writing the old year at the beginning of the new one, simply because all of us would probably like not to be one year closer to death. That general phenomenon was compounded in me, with my tendency to dwell on past regrets -- I want last year back, so that I can grow some balls and ask that girl out, or whatever. Richard wrote me an e-mail recently in which he said that I love to regret, and I must confess that is my sole vice.
This year, however, it didn't happen. I resolutely and firmly wrote "04." Some good things really did happen in 2003. All my friends threw me a great birthday party, the best I've ever had. I moved into a really nice apartment, where I still live. I managed to hold down a steady job for the entire year. I started this blog and got some cool people to help me write it. I started grad school at a school other than Olivet. I participated in my first conference, where I seemed to be a smashing success. I wrote a few good essays. I made the gratuitous trip to New York. I don't think there were many significant opportunities that I passed up or that I completely botched.
Yet I do not want 2003 back. After watching in shame as my nation went to war, after getting tangled up in a hopeless love than which no more hopeless can be thought, after (positive, happy, wonderful) circumstances intervened to pull my best friend slowly out of my life in the style of a Band-Aid pulled slowly off a hairy arm over the course of several months, after losing a professor and mentor whom I had really only just met and thereby being reminded afresh why I could never have been truly welcome in the church to which I dedicated the first seventeen years of my life, after a nice lunch where the president of my alma mater schmoozed me and lied to my face, after realizing that an ex-girlfriend really does hate me and that it would be better if we were never in the same room ever again, after seriously wishing that God would just leave me the fuck alone -- I do not want 2003 back.
So here's to 2004. May we not lose hope entirely. May we not face the prospect of closed borders and disappearing opportunities. May we leave our scabs alone long enough for them to heal. May we at least set our house in order.
