P. Ezra Vasquez's Blog

The new year is rapping on my chamber door here in Hirakata, Japan with midnight a couple of hours away. I’m sitting here on this cool, rainy night reflecting on a year that saw my departure from USC and Los Angeles as part of a move to teach in Japan. The logistics of that transition occupied at least a third of the year. The rest exists in a blur. I blogged some of it — probably not enough — as much for my own memory as to share. I can recall my director standing in front of the faculty housing as I arrived nine months ago as though it were last month.

The transition between years used to evoke a celebratory sentiment, but recent years have taught me to look askance at a new year. It seems each year since 2016 has foisted some new calamity on the world. Last year, January 1st hadn’t even arrived yet when I’d already grown tired of hearing about some new technology that meant the demise of academic integrity — never did a word grow so tiresome so fast — never did a fraternity of professionals express such gleeful enthusiasm for a product so certain to eliminate their jobs. Then came the death of Twitter — at least in an appellative sense, and the possibility lingers in every sense. That brought about the 2nd word I was tired of hearing about before its 1st news cycle concluded: “X” — a logo that begs to foreshadow its own future deletion from my Android device (it suddenly strikes me as odd to refer to something I so rarely use for talking to people as a phone).

Then, of course, there are the wars, each with its own set of bad guys for Americans of opposing political fanaticisms to adopt as proxy champions for their culture war. A good story has to give you someone to root for, right?

Still, hope persists that this year will chuck the trend, and the world will catch its collective breath to suck in a few fleeting gasps of normalcy — and, with some luck, sanity — that state of mind from which political ideologues on the left and right each year become ever more estranged. Or perhaps at the very least check in from Planet Mongo to assure everyone back on Earth that the rain has let up.

But then I remember it’s an election year. Still, one can hope — ravens notwithstanding.

Here’s to dull years, twenty-twenty-four.

Cheers and all the rest. 🥂