Random thoughts on a New Year

So here it is 2009, and we here at America's Fish have been so preoccupied with the potentially impending demise of a newspaper and the impending, potentially now-annual loss of a newspaper job that we have left the news of Mike Shanahan's firing float atop our little pond like a dead fish for nearly three weeks. Of course, what spare time we have had left during those three weeks when finished worrying about the aforementioned impending doom has actually been spent rounding up rumors about Mike Shanahan's replacement and his replacement's staff, so the fact that Shanny has remained there is actually an accurate reflection of what we have been working on since Dec. 30. A couple bottles of wine have been emptied during that period and, of course, a little Guitar Hero played, but mostly it has been Shanahan/Impending Doom.

A few other things are going on in the world of which we here at America's Fish are acutely aware. There is a presidential inauguration happening in a matter of hours, nearly a year to the day that we made our first-ever political contribution while unemployed from a newspaper for the first time during a campaign season. It was, as it turns out, money well spent. If only we had been able to collect odds on that $199 like the forward-thinking among us who bet $100 in February 2007 that the Colorado Rockies would make it to the World Series, but perhaps it will pay out in the end eventually anyway.

There, too, has been many scheduled outings to a movie theater that have been postponed due to illness first by Mrs. America's Fish and then later by Mr. America's Fish. Among the long list of movies that the Fish family has been intending to see and will, probably, almost-definitely, maybe see before the actual Oscar nominations are announced are Frost/Nixon, Che, Milk, Slumdog Millionaire, the Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Gran Torino and The Wrestler. On the bright side, the backlog of movies waiting to be seen has killed any lingering desire to rubberneck at Valkyrie.

There has been the Lost marathon, the first four seasons of the show watched in the span of two weeks, a process that turned out to be beneficial to the quality of the show. Charlie and Claire are considerably less annoying when packed into such a short period of viewing, and the whole Jack/Kate/Sawyer soap opera likewise becomes decreasingly agonizing to watch. More importantly, the appearances of our favorite character, the Smoke Monster, seem much more frequent and entertaining, although no less frustratingly ambiguous in their resolution.

And that is, sadly, about it. The weeks have passed full of stress and uncertainty and illness and it is only now on this 60-degree January day (take that, Chicago) that we have taken the time to notice that is, in fact, a new year, and that what this year holds is still unknown -- 2008 turned out OK, more or less. If only we could erase December.