New Year’s … well, you know

I don’t make new year’s resolutions. I don’t believe in ‘em. I never keep ‘em. I find I can change my life quite substantially during Lent, thank you very much; it was thanks to Lenten abstinences that I lost the taste for potato chips and for sodas.

But that’s by the way.

I don’t get into new year’s resolutions, but I do get into changing my life. I tend to do that pretty regularly — every three to five years for the last twenty or so years. The one constant, the one element to which I keep returning? Academia, specifically the college/university where I have taught, part-time or full-time, since 1986.

Ye gods.

So I say that to say this. I left the life of the bureaucrat behind five days ago, though I’d been on vacation for 8 weeks and 2 days (in the employ of the Bahamas government, a person is able to accumulate weeks of vacation from year to year. In the old days one could do that indefinitely, and I have met many civil servants who have easily 50 weeks of vacation (my parents were among those people). In recent times, things changed, and one could only accumulate up to 15 weeks’ vacation.

I have been whittling down my vacation all year long, else when October came I’d've had just about 12 weeks for this year.

This is one of the perks. This is one of the things that keep civil servants from going absolutely crazy. When you think about it, it’s one of the crueller tricks the service plays with you. It dangles this vaca-carrot before your face, and you run, lulled into happy thoughts of when you take it all, until you run over a cliff or a precipice or that baby someone placed in your path.

Happy New Year, of course

It’s 2009, which means that I’m no longer a civil servant.

And yes, that’s cause for celebration.

I thought I’d post a couple of images just to move the process along.The quality isn’t what I’d want it to be, but as I took them from my phone I’m not complaining.

The first one is a wannabe photo. I walked outside on  Tuesday to collect the hammock in which I’d been lying, and stopped. On the telephone wires, silhouetted against the backdrop of the sky you see in the pic, was the waterbird that hangs out round our pool. It used to find a habitat in the empty lot that has since become a warehouse in the middle of our neighbourhood (don’t ask), along with taller, whiter birds (egrets, I’m guessing, but I’m not a bird person so I don’t know for sure). Behind the bird was the brand-new crescent moon, floating on its back in a limpid sky. And then there was the streetlight in the corner of the frame. Of course I was cameraless and phoneless and knew that if I dashed back into the house to get one the whole thing would change. And sure enough. When I came back out, a cloud had covered the moon, and by the time I was where I’d been before, the bird was gone.

But use your imagination anyway.