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New Year's Dissolutions

Another arbitrary year ends.
As anyone who has read this or this knows, I am more partial to celebrating New Year's Day on April 1st. Still, the calendar year 2004 has been an interesting one, although I'm glad to be seeing the end of it.
If nothing else, I can say "it is the year 2005" in my best Vince Caroli voice, laugh hysterically at the inside joke, and pine after the hoverboard I should have had by now.
Professionally, 2004 was a year of hell. That's the part I'll be glad to leave behind, even if there's only more hell and worse hell waiting in the wings.
Personally, 2004 was an adventure from beginning to end. Some good, some not so good, some deadly, but mostly fun. Who can ask for more?
...
...
2004 has been a year of blasts from the past for me, all well and good for the perpetual student of history (both personal and universal) that I am. At the end of it, I'm a 27-year old who collects toys, watches cartoons, plays with bugs, loves baseball, and it pretty much set in his ways, or at least in his experience. The last part deserves explanation.
In short, what has changed? The answer: not much.
Although I've done a lot of things this year for the first time (various trips, joining Mensa), all of those things were realizations of lifelong desires. The other stuff was basically an extension of habits gained over the years. Perhaps this is a sign of being well-adjusted (an odd idea, that), or of being an adult. My job, although it's the very definition of dealing with constantly changing situations, has in and of itself become stable. Stability has never been a way of life for me, and although I still wander and wonder and follow the winds of chance and of whim, even the wandering has become stable.
In other words, I feel stuck in a rut.
Hopefully 2005 will be a year of change. The idea of making it to that magic number, itself an arbitrary designation, has always been special to me.
The change I crave comes from within. Certain habits need to be broken, others modified, others examined even if I leave them as they are. After all, I'm not getting any younger.
Then again, it could always be worse.
The massive earthquake and resulting tsunami that struck parts of Southeast Asia is an historical event, to say the least. With the death toll over 100,000 and still rising, the measure of the disaster simply in terms of lives lost is staggering. One of my coworkers even mused that it could be 'the beginning of the end', and while that way of thinking makes zero sense to me, there are factors at work that may point in the general direction of Armageddon.
I will not hold that there was an active agency involved in the needless slaughter and destruction that took place so quickly, nor do I believe that it is the direct result of the wounds inflicted by mankind upon Mother Nature, as a friend of a friend suggested. It was a massive earthquake in a geologically cranky area of the world which also happens to be densely populated, and in the latter lies the tragedy.
Consider Mexico City, for example. It's one of the largest cities in the world (8th as of 2004). It's also built in large part on top of a lake and sinks slowly year by year. I'm not sure how nearly nine million people feel comfortable living in such a place, but to a large extent the choice is not in their hands, for Mexico is not a rich nation. An untimely disaster could claim the lives of millions, whether it's a natural or artificial event.
Our ecosystem, or nature, if you like, strives for balance between elements that push and pull from every direction. Mankind has certainly contributed mightily toward unbalancing the system, or using the system to its own ends, which is within our right as a species bent upon survival, even if we have taken survival to an unhealthy extreme by exchanging fleeting individual success with the long term success of the race. The destitute, or at least desperate, as judged by conventional measures of success (power, fame, money), tend to create more offspring than their successful brethren, who may not even start reproducing until they have passed their prime years. Just as birds, fish, and insects truly dominate the earth (reckoned by number of species), the downtrodden, in their way, dominate humanity.
Sure, the political process in every reasonably civilized nation, whether autocratic or representative, is dominated by the rich and powerful elite who number no more than five percent of any given nation, usually far less. Hitler may have held millions spellbound as absolute master of Germany, but it was those millions who fought and died, although most of them had no choice in the matter simply because they were born in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and didn't have the resources to leave. It is not the nature of a disadvantaged majority to wander like a blight across the face of the earth. Usually they will occupy their niches, humble though they may be, and endure in spite of external conditions. As they endure, they multiply. As they multiply, the possibilities for adversity on a smaller scale increase (disease and crime specifically).
And disasters are made that much more horrible.