Mike Scalise

Its 2009. Last night, when the clock dinged midnight–after the wife and I clinked glasses at a nice Belgian restaurant in our neighborhood, and commended ourselves for thirteen straight years of finding each other attractive–I sent out a blanket text message to a ton of people wishing them HAPPY FRIGGIN NEW YEAR DAMMIT. Here’s a grab bag of anonymous responses:

• “Most overrated night ever.”
• “I just asked everyone if they wanted a shot at the title. No takers. Pussies.”
• “Happy New Year, Fuck Face!”
• “You too, dammit.”
• “Happy fucking year or what not.”
• “Fuck 09. I’m hungover and waiting in the longest line at the iHop. Hope your day is going much better.”

Based on these results, its not hard to see that (a) I’m connected to an ornery (and vlugar) bunch, and (b) that bunch is pretty unimpressed about the year they just had, and (c) nonplussed at best about the year coming up.

Know what: Me too. It’s been a year–I think for many people–where personal victories eventually became overshadowed by a cloud of nameless dread about the tenuous state of things. Everyone seems anxious to reboot. I’d like to say I’m going to “start things over,” but I’ve learned the hard way that bold, early declarations of your intentions often lead to withering results (See: Beard by 30, Book a Week Until I’m 31). Rather than start this year off with a promising motto, I’ll waffle, and just hope that this is the Year of Seeing How Things Turn Out.

Perhaps the master of Seeing How Things Turn Out is person I know Kyoko Mori, who’s able to cull together success out of an equal mix of patience, openness, and keen opportunism. Both in life and in her writing, she thrives off the complicated art of reaction: responding to what comes her way with eager curiosity, almost as if she’s excited to have something new and difficult to unravel and illuminate. To see what I mean, read her essay “Pullovers” in last summer’s American Scholar, which in some unexplainable way makes complete, deepy-felt sense out of a homemade sweater, her father’s mistress, and Coco Chanel:

To accommodate the layers he wore on top, Chuck needed his sweaters to fit snugly. He was nearly six feet tall and only weighed 140 pounds. The blue pullover was perfect until he turned 35 and suddenly gained 15 pounds. Cashiers at stores stared at him every time he wrote a check. In the driver’s license photograph, his eye sockets appeared hollow.

“I wouldn’t take a check from this guy, either,” he said to the teenage clerk at a record store. He turned to me and added, “I can’t believe I looked like this and you actually went out with me.” We had met seven years earlier in Milwaukee, where we were students, and trained together for a marathon before we ever went out on a date. We both hated the color-coordinated outfits sold at running stores. “Real runners don’t match” was our motto. If he’d been better dressed or more handsome, I wouldn’t have been interested in him.

“This isn’t a very good picture,” I said. “I don’t think you were ever so pale.”

“But I was this thin?”

“Yeah.”

He shook his head in disbelief and assured the clerk that his driver’s license was authentic. “I wouldn’t have chosen such a crummy picture for a fake ID.”

I made another sweater for him and reclaimed the blue pullover. It hung off my shoulders and came down to my knees, but I didn’t mind. I, too, wore several layers of clothing—a tank top, a cotton turtleneck, a long-sleeved T-shirt, a short-sleeved T-shirt, and another, looser tank top—but they were all under my oversized sweater and down coat. My T-shirts and tank tops were red, orange, green, pink; my coat was purple. Even if I was only walking to my car, I dressed bright and big, as though I could scare the weather into submission. I didn’t understand why people described me as “petite” and “tiny” when, in my mind, I was a giant of strength.

In other People I Know News: Congrats to Patricia Engel for finalist-ing in the Narrative magazine 2008 Fiction Contest (placing behind struggling up and comer Richard Bausch, a choice Art Taylor did a good job of WTF-ing). Same goes to Rion Scott, who explains here how he was named a finalist in the Indiana Review Fiction Contest despite allegedly once exposing his tone-deafness to judge Tayari Jones. Ryan Call keeps on making it happen. And finally, a big, huge congrats to Joe Hall, whose book of poems, “Pigafetta Is My Wife: Three Movments Toward a Love Poem“, aims to come out like a year from now from these guys.

Congratulations, everyone. Here’s to Seeing How Things Turn Out in 2009.