2007 in review

There should be a term for the type of creeping, subtle madness that gets under your skin alongside days and nights without sleep and a new disconcerting familiarity with the passage of the stars across the sky.

Actually, there is. It's called jet-lag, oh dear. Mine is compounded with a sequence of migraines and general insomnia, and I feel like I've been awake for all of 2008. Situation normal.

Well, I keep trying to do the 2007 fic in review meme, and failing. I'll just note that my favourite story of my own last year was "Letters to La Paz", and in total, I wrote thirteen stories in five fandoms to a total of 38,620 words. It sounds like it should be about one a month, but I actually wrote five of them in a two week period, and only wrote one story from January to July. My main goal for the next year, other than, er, Finals and law school, is to write more, and angst less. On which note, happy new year to everyone.

( life in review, 2007 )

I need to sleep, and I need to not be thinking about TOS fic, that would be bad.

Thinking

For the last couple of months, my grandmother has been living with my Indiana relatives, as to not let her green card lapse. She was there when I appeared over Christmas, and it was good to see her; she's eighty-two, speaks no English, has seen more change in her life than any ten people I know. One night after I'd been there a couple of days, I was hiding my head in a pillow, a defence mechanism after spending too much time with my Indiana relatives, and she was calmly telling me how much I take after my father, who is her eldest child. My aunt and her kids are loud, make a lot of noise - which I suspect was Dadi talking around the fact I don't know the Hindi for "extrovert" - whereas my dad is quiet and bookish, and like me, it damages his head to spent a lot of time surrounded by loud noises. I appreciated that someone had noticed this fact, and took my head out from the pillow. "In my next life," I said very seriously and clearly, "I want to be a tree."

( in which I talk quite a bit about religion, my own thereof, and you're free to skip )

The funny thing was, I thought all this through on Christmas Day. It had been a long, slow, very bright day, and Shivani, my twelve-year-old cousin, had asked me to come with her to see Alvin and the Chipmunks and I had been unable to think of any reasons why this was a bad idea, and then we got back and my aunt said, "You want to come to the mandir?"

"What's the occasion?" I said.

"Tuesday."

Tuesday is, indeed, the day of the Hanuman Chalisa puja. So we went. And in the snow, and the bells on the radio, I was missing Oxford a little, Oxford, where Christmas is magical in a particularly secular way, and thinking, and this is what came out. Happy New Year, to all. May you grow in dharma, may you live long and prosper.