The Year in Review

Happy 2008!

As promised, here is a recap of my 2007. (I'm going to start at the beginning and hope that I get to the end before I have to go to the airport. I'm starting 2008 in Las Vegas. My friends Lee, Clark and I are headed to sin city to celebrate Clark's birthday today and mine on Friday. Wish me luck.)

So the year begin with a whimper. Litter ally a whimpering man in a corner at a New Years party hosted by my friend Alan and David, who now thanks to the blog are known as the Hanukkah Hotties. The whimperer in question had broken up with his partner of several years in 2006 so he was still a little maudlin. Who am I kidding? He was down right inconsolable. And it became sadder as the night progressed. And by sadder I mean more pathetic. I drove him home at about 1 AM. (Oh and I did not take him. He was not my date. Just another guest at the party. And by drove him home, I really mean that, I just drove his tired grief-stricken ass home.) And I have sympathy for him. I can imagine how a new years party after his previous year could be overwhelming. But here is the thing-- Stay Home!!!!

At the end of January I lead a mission team to work with Habitat for Humanity in New Orleans. It was a group of folks from my local Baptist Association. I was the youngest person by 30 years. Not an exaggeration. Me and a group of senior citizens. (Oh I almost forgot before the mission trip I attended MacWorld, GeekWorld as I like to call it, a gathering of mac and apple accessory vendors and the people that love them. It is also the site where Steve Jobs gives a keynote address and in 2007 introduced the i-phone. It was there that it became official, I am a mac lover. Once you go mac you don't go back. I drank the kool-aid. I became a convert. And by the end of the keynote, my smart phone that I had had for approximately 2 weeks sucked. I only had eyes for the iphone. And I can't wait until my t-mobile contract runs out an the iphone comes down a little more in price so that I can have one of my own.) The mission trip was great--in the sense that I was able to remember one of the things that I had loved all my life but really had forgotten as an adult. I love all things associated with building, creating space and design. Where many of the geriatrics in my group only wanted to learn one skill the whole week and just continue doing that over and over, I couldn't get enough. I wanted to learn everything. I'm planning to return in 2008. However, leading the group was hard. I learned that I like leading a group but I want a partner to do it with. Someone else who can be the adult. I thought it would be easier leading this team than when I worked with teenagers. Wrong. In many ways they behaved just as an adolescent. I often felt like I was baby sitting. One story in particular stands out. We were visiting with a family that had been displaced by the hurricane and had recently returned to their newly restored home. One of the women was telling her story to a group of us when one of our team said very loudly, "Brian, I'm hungry, let's go eat." At least with teenagers they will usually just grumble and pout behind your back. So while I'm planning to go back it will be solo.

In February, I attended an Enneagram training in North Georgia. The enneagram is a personality typing system similar to the Myers-Briggs. Not really, but that is the easiest way to describe it to people who don't know anything about it. Well anyway this was a five day training that often involved 14 to 16 hour days. It felt more cult like than educational. I got a lot of good information. But I also got a lot of over-sharing from essentially strangers. I learned in only five days that one woman had been raped, one man had been sexually abused, one woman attempted suicide, one woman's mother committed suicide, and my personal favorite, one woman had an affair with her best friend's husband. I was ready to go when it was all over.

I returned to San Francisco on Thursday, February 22, the day after Ash Wednesday. And on Friday, February 23, I learned that my twin brother had colo-rectal cancer. Lent had begun with a bang and it was not going to end anytime soon. The initial thought was that they would go in a few weeks later and do surgery to remove the tumor and then do chemo-therapy and radiation. However, when they did the surgery they learned that the tumor was much larger than they expected. So they closed him back up. He began chemotherapy six weeks later. He was doing chemotherapy every week with an oncologist close to where they live. This continued for four months. At that point a pet scan was done where they discovered that the tumors had continued to grown--at that point his liver was now grossly enlarged. The doctor gave him two options (1) Call in hospice or (2) try another much more aggressive treatment that the doctor was fairly confident would put my brother in the hospital because his body was so weak. (To me it sounded like would you like to die at home or at the hospital?) Thankfully my brother consulted with an oncology center in Tampa, about an hour and a half from their house. Moffett Hospital was able to give him more options. So he began going every two weeks for treatments in the late summer. At this point the tumors have stabilized, they aren't growing any more but they have not begun to shrink yet either. He is very weak and often in lots of pain. However, I have now seen him at Thanksgiving and Christmas and he looked better than he did in June when I was in Florida for a family wedding. (I'll get to the wedding in just a second.) He had gained a few pounds and his color looked a lot better. So my family continues to remain hopeful. Although, I'm finding it difficult to be hopeful. Part of my job feels like it is to notice what is really going on. And what I know is that 5% of people who are diagnosed at stage four, which is what my brother was diagnosed at, survive five years. That means 95% do not. So I'm counting on the rest of my family to be hopeful when I cannot be. For a while I was worried about my health since we are twins. Even though we are fraternal and I was having no symptoms, I was still afraid. But I had a colonoscopy in June and everything was clean and clear. The colonoscopy was not that bad--it was just a nice little nap. However, preparing for the colonoscopy was a bear. I took BART to my friend Shannon's office before the procedure. She was going to take me and then take me home. Well even though I was fairly confident that there could be nothing left in my body, if you know what I'm saying, I still had to go to the BART bathroom, which is approximately 3 blocks from my house. The whole situation has colored my entire year. Which is why the crap theme seemed especially appropriate for my Christmas card. It was true on so many levels.

One highlight came in March. I was in a musical, The Secret Garden. Being in a musical had been one of my goals for the year and it came true very early. I was in the chorus and it was only a concert version, meaning not fully staged. But it was a lot of fun. I hope to do more of it in the future. In March and April I also served on a search committee for a position for the Alliance of Baptist--that was fun and rewarding and I made some new friends. Then I attended the Alliance of Baptist Convocation in Washington DC . Where I had the best chili dog ever! Ever! Ben's Chili Bowl. You must go there the next time you are in the Nation's Capital. I mean it is gooo-ooood! You take the metro to U street and it is right across the street. Ahh, yeah!!

I'm going to wrap this up soon, because it has gone on for far too long. The summer brought a family "wedding." You'll notice that wedding is in quotes. That is because the couple was already married. They had been married the year before in Las Vegas on a roller coaster in the Stratosphere hotel. Yep, that's right, classy eh? But they still wanted to have a "real wedding." On the beach--in Florida--in the Summer, well May, but it was hot. Oh and she was five months pregnant. It was crazy. Then her Dad, my cousin's husband, a colonel in the army, tried to bully me right during the wedding rehearsal into saying "who gives this woman to be married." I don't say that. I won't ever say that. And I told him that. But we went back and forth. I was pissed. Finally, I told him I would think about what I could say and I came up with something which I thought was very nice. So I called him and told him what I would say and his response was "adequate." No that is what he said "adequate." #@%&-hole. So that was fun;) I started blogging in July. Also my sister and niece visited over the summer. I was glad that they were here. But they are hard to host. Neither would eat anything I suggested or offered. One night I ordered Chinese food--they like Chinese food. So I asked them what they wanted and they said shrimp fried rice and bourbon chicken. First of all shrimp fried rice is the leftovers of the chinese world, but second bourbon chicken? Bourbon is not Chinese. It is made in Kentucky. But apparently throughout the country on Chinese menus is something called Bourbon Chicken. But we did not have it here where actual Chinese people live. So I was kind of glad when they went back home, but it was nice to have them visit.

At the end of the summer I gathered with my buddies from the First Parish Project. We met at a retreat center in Northern California. I can't even begin to tell you how great that was.

The fall and winter has been filled with two trips to Florida for Thanksgiving and Christmas. The book Before the Amen was published in November. This is a worship resource that I had a prayer published in. Not only am I published I'm actually in an index. (Dixon, Brian 39) Yay! I applied for a sabbatical grant that I did not get, but I'm still taking a sabbatical beginning on March 1--only two months away. I wish it began tomorrow.

So that is those are the general high-lights and low-lights of 2007. I am very tired. And in much need of the rest that my sabbatical will hopefully bring. I'll spend time on Friday, my 36th birthday, reflecting on what I have learned about myself in my 35th year.

Know that I'll continue blogging through the next year to keep you all in the zany loop of my life. And I look forward to hearing and seeing many of you.

Peace out!