Things get lost in the media sometimes

Sometimes, reality gets lost in the media. The news about the county next door was tracking on the national news for a couple days. To be clear, when you live in my part of California, your county is never on the news for a good reason, and Lake County has spent much of the summer attempting to burn itself to the ground. And succeeding. The fire started on Saturday, quickly grew to enormous, and then went straight to absurd. If you don't want to sleep peacefully again, I recommend watching some of the videos people posted on YouTube. On Monday, it was all over the national news. By Tuesday it was in the side bar of the news (and on Tuesday the fire was growing, forcing different people to evacuate, burning more buildings to the ground. By Wednesday it was three pages back. It makes me think about how the last thing we saw on the news from Nepal hadn't done much followup on that enormous earthquake. How the coverage of Japan after the tsunami was focused almost entirely unbelievable footage, but that we cut out only after it looked like the nuclear reactors weren't going to cause a complete meltdown. How much of the story are we missing because the draw of news is to cover the bigger stories, the more unbelievable the better. Just some food for thought, but it doesn't look like the news cares about follow through. If you want to know the whole truth, there isn't a venue for that because we consume awe and shock and fear. Sometimes I wonder that as we are consuming the media, it is eating us as well.

Good Bye to another year

Another year has passed, and things have been...

I honestly don't know where to start. Some of the best moments of my life, some pretty crappy moments, and some moments I don't even know how to take yet.

I guess, like all things, a year is a hard thing to judge in the dark of the long nights that cluster around the solstice. It's too complicated to say "this year sucked" or "This year was great!" To be honest, choices I made this year have yet to bear fruit. I could be sitting on even bigger changes (plus or minus) than all the years previous.

Officially, with regards to 2014, I feel I'm still too close to make a judgement. It's been sublime. I have more friends than last year. I have more opportunities than I had last year. I learned things. I grew--sometimes forcibly--and I have a wild suspicion that life is changing in a positive direction. It wasn't easy, by any means.

Was 2014 a bad year? No, not really.

Was it a good year? Meh, some years are perfectly serviceable, and someday I'll look back at this time and wonder why I didn't shout from the rooftops how incredible the past year was. I lived. I basked in the glory of the universe.

On the other hand, life is always so fragile. We dance the knife's edge between triumph and ruin, and they both lurk behind closed doors we didn't even know were there. I'm glad to be moving forward, but not because I'd like to cast the last year aside. Good things are coming--some obvious, some that seem like inconveniences now, and some I have no idea are hiding in my future.

While I might not know what to think of 2014, I do know what to think of 2015:

Bring it.