December 30, 2007  

Favorite posts of 2007

Personal blogging is by definition a bit narcissistic. Compiling a list of your own favorite posts of the year, well, that’s downright solipsistic. But so it is. Here’s the best of this year, in easy-to-digest narrative format.

I started 2007 strong by challenging a MacArthur Genius and getting it handed right back to me. Beaten, I went to Russia and contemplated empire. Not content with the glories of the past, I experienced our glorious future of levitating trains in Shanghai.

Full of the future, I discoursed on how to change the world in the here and now, remembering our human knack for figuring out how to destroy the planet utterly. I started local, though, helping envision a better sewer.

But that was all so deep. So I got drunk on a rooftop and focused on the people who really matter, including those I never had a chance to meet. This all led to the meaning of life, naturally.

Now enlightened, I was able to pull back into my iPod-shell and dream of random things. Then I took my parents to Italy on a journey that was both wonderful and harrowing and learned how nothing is ever really random. Like Star Wars, just one story in a much larger universe.

So I relaxed by shooting rockets at friends and, ahem, aiming for the cornhole. Too much of a good thing, but of course nature has a way of balancing things out.

I shook my fist at the natural world and turned to man-machine interfaces and technological humanism. Take that!

But I was too bold. The long arm of the law, aided by border paranoia and Big Business, nearly got me for the love of artisanal fakery.

Nothing left to do at this point but have fun, so thelovelywife and I organized a small get-together.

And that, friends, was 2007.

Here’s last year’s best-of. For god’s sake, is anything improving around here?