2007 very well could be remembered as the year when time stood still. I am still in my room watching the local broadcast of the New Year's Eve party in San Antonio. A copy of A la recherche du temps perdu is still on my nightstand, and I am still reading it. Our troops are still in Iraq, and the Bush Administration continues to fortify it's reputation as a group of bunglers. I cooked dinner today using leftovers from the Christmas feast like last year (Ham, potato, & cheddar soup w/a Caesar salad). I am neither richer nor poorer or fatter nor skinnier. My hair didn't even get grayer. I am still alone. All in all, at first glance, it would appear that I managed to get through an entire year in which nothing significant or remarkable happened. At first glance. As I think about it a little more, I am reminded of a passage in the above novel ruminating on a violin sonata: "The septet, which had begun again, was moving towards its close; again and again one phrase or another from the sonata recurred, but altered each time, its rhythm and harmony different, the same and yet something else, as things recur in life." With that thought in mind, I feel it might be useful, in order to not feel like a faineant, to examine the past year with a little more scrutiny.

The first logical place to start would be to list some of the things that happened to me in the past year, good or bad, that have never happened to me before. Let's see: I got beat up by a girl; won my Fantasy baseball league; got stood up (Inconceivable!!); played drums way past midnight by the banks of the Guadalupe; hunted birds in Athens; attended a NASCAR race. I now realize that there was quite a bit of new music to take in this year.

Variations on a theme are sometimes easy to pick up: I have attended reunions before but not my 20th high school reunion, which had completely different rhythms and more pleasant harmonies for me than the 10 year, or the rhythms of a move that doesn't crash into a discordant screech, but, rather falls together like C, E, & G as my move to Alamo Heights did, or the Horstman Christmas party which had pretty much the same harmony as in years past but the rhythms were completely different with less people but more that I knew, maybe that's why, for the first time, I didn't dance.

Sometimes the variations are subtle and complex, like a fine wine or a good poem:  To be able to see that the daily action of cooking dinner is in fact not a repitition of yesterday's or last year's activity, but is, today, completely different from any other day.  The way the Italian chicken sausage melts the cherry tomatos and goat cheese into the ridges ofthe farafelle into one great dish of love, is completely different than the way a cilantro chutney lightly caresses the skin of the mahi-mahi.  Or as Maya puts it in Sideways, "If I opened a bottle of wine today it would taste different than if I'd opened it on any other day"

(more to come)