I don't think I made any specific New Year's resolutions last year. I used to love having an end-of-year period of deep introspection and figuring out what lessons I needed to learn and what paths I needed to explore, but for the past two or three years I've had the sense that I'm going generally in the right direction and just need to keep chugging along. That's very satisfying in some ways, at least the feeling that there's nothing in my life right now that needs to be fixed, but I'm beginning to feel the need for some kind of spiritual challenge.

While I figure that out, though, it's a good time to look back for a moment. I have a surprisingly crappy memory, so I'm sure I'm forgetting some of the big things that have happened, but the highlights of this year include the following:

• this was my first year of tenure, which was generally uneventful, but has given me an overall sense of accomplishment, satisfaction, and relief
• my book came out! That's a biggie. :)
• I've made pretty good progress on the second book project. At the beginning of last year it was a very nebulous idea, and I was terrified of mentioning it to anyone. Over the course of the year I tracked down some good evidence in the archives, and had some wonderful and encouraging conversations with colleagues, and now I'm very excited about the whole thing.
• I agreed (God help me) to host the yearly meeting of my principal academic organization in 2008. This isn't really an accomplishment yet, but several people talked to me about doing this, which means they must think I'm reasonably competent (or at least sufficiently gullible), and I'm kind of excited about that.
• Several people in my department have made noises about how I'd be a good candidate for department chair.
• I worked on my first Habitat for Humanity build! (and will do another this spring.)
• Started taking yoga classes just about a year ago; that's been a great and satisfying success.
• We made some nice improvements to the house this year, at least inside (outside is going to hell in a weedy overgrown handbasket) - new carpet and tile in the master bedroom & bath, a couple of new pieces of furniture, and lots of plans for next year...

Those are the big things; I guess the main theme is that this has been a really good year for my professional life. I haven't accomplished anything big (good or bad) personally or socially or spiritually; that's what I'd like to work on more for the coming year, though I'm not sure quite how to proceed. Mostly my goal is to make new friends: I like the people I work with, but I've felt a little starved for interesting conversation recently, and I realize that I've fallen into a lot of social ruts. (I even made the bar a far more interesting place in 2005 than I did in 2006; maybe I can liven that up a little too.) Time to stretch myself a little and shake things up.

What about you?

Have a lovely New Year's Eve, everyone; be safe, and I wish you all the best in friends, family, and good fortune for the new year!

Ingredients for a pleasant, relaxing holiday:

• 1 blazing fire in the fireplace
• 2 snuggly cats
• 1 snuggly spouse
• 1 leg of lamb in the oven
• 1,000 jigsaw puzzle pieces on the card table (with hopes of coming together into a 16th century Spanish map)
• 1 excellent book with which to curl up with on couch (gift from spouse)
• 1 extravagant gift for self, impulsively purchased on eBay
• 2 fun long phone calls from family
• several glasses of Spanish wine

Merry Christmas everybody! Hope yours was warm and fun and full of love.

Happy holidays, everybody! I wish you all warmth and cheer and good fortune and the company of fine friends.

The LWI and I visited my family over Thanksgiving this year instead of Christmas, so we have Christmas all to ourselves. Neither of our families is particularly problematic, but even so it's incredibly nice and relaxing to not have to worry about transporting ourselves anywhere or preparing things for guests. My blood pressure feels normal for the first time in months.

This also means that I'm likely to be poking around the internets today and tomorrow, so if any of you want to escape your own families, come and have a drink at the bar! I'll put on the spiced wine, hot mulled cider and eggnog. Everyone's welcome!

Seen pretty much everywhere: the end-of-year meme, when you post the first sentence you wrote each month of the past year.

January: Hark! Wise bloggy friends, I call upon your wisdom.

February: Don't forget Carnivalesque coming up!

March: My first crush, my first all-out, head-over-heels young-teen crush was on a boy I met at a two-week summer science camp.

April: jo(e), getting bored with the lack of activity in the bar this last week, has proposed a hearty round of jousting (accompanied by the appropriate jukebox music, of course).

May: The wicked witch is dead!

June: Highlights of the past week (besides being able to connect to the internets in the national library!): a morning at the Madrid book fair, one of the biggest in the world.

July: One of the things I occasionally marvel at is how gracefully my in-laws duck all questions of religion and politics, given the striking and potentially painful differences in perspective caused by Spain's transition from dictatorship to democracy in the late 1970s and the drastically reduced role of the Catholic church.

August: You know how yawns are contagious, in that if you see someone else yawn, it provokes you to yawn as well?

September: So, first of all, a Big Fat Prize to Scrivener for tagging me for this meme!

October: So here's another question (dang, you guys are better than a Magic Eight Ball!).

November: Okay, all the cool kids are doing it, so I'll throw my hat in the ring as well for National Blog Posting Month.

December: In the middle of a very boring presentation the other day, as my mind was wandering about, I came up with the perfect title for my next book project.

Conclusion: Memes, requests for advice, general silliness, and occasional hints at the academic life. That's more or less on target.

Yesterday on “Charlie Rose” we saw the greatest interview with Guillermo del Toro, Alejandro González Iñárritu, and Alfonso Cuarón, three innovative Mexican filmmakers who are also clearly good friends. Charlie was almost irrelevant to the discussion, as the three enthusiastically talked about themes and styles and stories in their work. What was interesting to note, in spite of the well-deserved fame each has achieved, was that they talked very little about their own work; each seemed more interested in describing and discussing the work of his friends. This made for an even richer discussion, I think, and of course it depended on the intimate knowledge each man had of his friends and their ideas, as well as a refreshing lack of ego.

At one point, towards the end, Charlie asked if they ever felt competitive, given their prominence and the fact that their films tend to be nominated for similar awards. This struck me as a rather unnecessary question, since the nature of the previous hour’s discussion had made it perfectly clear that the three were far more mutually supportive than anything, but then I decided that that itself was probably what Charlie was trying to highlight. They seemed a bit surprised by the question, but then responded that of course they weren’t competitive, and in fact they each at some point had withdrawn from various competitions in the interest of highlighting another’s work. What impressed me the most was Cuarón’s simple, honest comment: “When you can transform envy into admiration, that’s incredibly liberating.”

The LWI, who is Spanish, immediately remarked that that sort of attitude was far more common among Hispanics than among Anglo-Saxons. I suspect he’s right, and isn’t that sad? Certainly we collectively celebrate hard work and individual accomplishment, and that’s important, but it also lends itself to a zero-sum attitude, where my win is your loss – and that in turn cultivates one-upmanship and envy. I’ve noticed this working in other ways, in that Americans generally center conversations around their jobs and their accomplishments, while Spaniards will almost never discuss their work, because it doesn’t have that much to do with their identity. I’m making huge generalizations here, and I know there are any number of exceptions. But I was so taken with the way these three men talked to each other, and more importantly how genuinely they listened to each other, and I wish we could liberate ourselves to celebrate each other that way a little more often.

So what is it with you guys, that when I quit posting you quit commenting? That's a sad lack of initiative, I say.

So I had to go dig up a meme, kindly assisted by the marvelous PPB, who has given me the letter J. My mission, should I choose to accept it, is to come up with ten (or more) things I love that begin with J.

1. The easiest one, and one for which I didn't even need any prompting or anything, is jo(e)!
2. Juice, of the orange or of the pomegranate, and sometimes of the lime and strawberry. I come to campus with a big travel mug full of orange juice every morning. Somehow I made it through all of grad school without becoming a coffee addict, but the juice I must have.
3. jacks! My brother taught me the joy of jacks, and I love the hypnotic element of the rhythm when you're on a roll. bounce-grab-catch! bounce-grab-catch! All through college and grad school I carried a little bag of jacks in my backpack, in case I got stuck somewhere and needed to kill time.
4. James Taylor. I can listen to James over and over and over and over, especially beauties like "You Can Close Your Eyes" and "Song for You Far Away."
5. journeys. I love to travel; this summer I'll be in England, Spain, and France, and I'm still planning that Costa Rica trip I promised myself when I got tenure.
6. jingle bells! I've never been dashing through the snow on a one-horse open sleigh (or any other kind of sleigh for that matter), but it sounds very festive and fun.
7. jack o'lanterns. My birthday is close to Halloween, and I used to celebrate with a pumpkin-carving party. Messy sloppy evil-faced fun!
8. Jacques Derrida. (Okay, not really, that was just a bluff. I'm getting a little desperate.)
9. Jagermeister! Hey, that doubles as an answer to one of the questions I got a while ago, I think from Lisa V. Jager definitely used to be my drink of choice, though it was my hanging-out-in-bars-with-guys-I-wanted-to-charm drink, and I don't do so much of that anymore. But it made me feel pretty darn charming.
10. jolines. (pronounced ho-LEEN-ace, with great exasperation). This is the favorite swear word of a friend of mine - it's one of these slightly silly adaptations of a more X-rated word in Spanish, like we'd say "shoot" or "dang" - and it just cracks me up.

Anybody else wanna play? Letters, everybody, got'cher letters here.

P.S. Hey - do I get any bonus points for having gotten four different pronunciations out of the same letter? Beat that.

You know it's almost the end of the semester when...

...your Western Civ class is having an animated discussion of the Great Schism (when for a few decades in the late fourteenth century there were two popes claiming the papacy), and when you ask for possible solutions for this crisis, one student gleefully pipes up "They could joust for it!"

... and instead of chuckling politely and getting the discussion back on course to a discussion of the role of church councils, you give in to evil temptation and respond that a good game spinoff of that would be "Rock'em Sock'em Pontiffs..."

... and the whole class falls into helpless ridiculousness for the rest of the hour.

In the middle of a very boring presentation the other day, as my mind was wandering about, I came up with the perfect title for my next book project. It's kind of a hard topic to describe, so I'm pleased at having captured a descriptive and catchy title for it.

Why is that a problem?

Because I've only just started working on this project. I'd like to do a presentation at an upcoming conference in the spring, and maybe turn that into an article, on the way to the book itself. So here's my dilemma: do I use the great title all the way through (it's one of those Catchy Phrases: More Description After the Colon titles that would let me adapt the stuff after the colon for whatever phase the project's in), or do I try to invent other (and certainly lesser) titles for these early steps?

These really are the early steps in what is clearly defined as a larger project, so I suppose it makes sense to use the same title. But when I read other people's CVs, I'm more likely to be impressed by a series of presentations and articles with different titles than I am by a series of pieces that are obviously just reworkings of the same material. Should I sacrifice my nifty title for the sake of dressing these early pieces up in different clothes? or should I sacrifice the illusion of different pieces of work for the sake of the nifty title?