I called 2004 “The Year Everything Changed” because that was the year I moved to Baltimore from New York, married Rob, started working on a new business, bought a house, bought a new car, and experienced any number of ricochets in the normal trajectory of my life. That’s an awful lot for someone who likes to eat the exact same thing every day, but it’s all documented there in the archive links down the right side of this page if you don’t believe me.

The stars may be aligning to make the next twelve months into another transformative year. I wish I could be more specific, but I am not fluent in star. If there is any sort of benevolent deity, one of the changes will be the inauguration of President Obama, which would be the only acceptable backdrop to my personal journey.

I have no roadmap in hand; whenever I try to plan something, it goes so dramatically off track that I might as well be following the MapQuest directions that have me circling my block three times before embarking on the least productive route ever devised from Point A to Point B. Google Earth is neater, don’t you think? No sooner do you tell it where you want to go than you’ve arrived, after a gentle hop and a smooth parabola. There is no weather on Google Earth, no traffic, nothing to get in your way, and the best part is, time is frozen until they get around to taking another satellite photo. Zoom in on my home, and you’ll see the tree my neighbors destroyed still there in all its splendor. Zoom in on my business, and you’ll see it’s still an empty industrial shell awaiting renovation. My old car is still in the parking space of my ex-boyfriend’s house.

These aren’t good things or bad. They’re just things that are observable through the scrim of time. I can tell you things have changed, but are you going to believe me or your lying eyes? You can tell me things are going to change and I can choose to remain focused on the world frozen in the amber lens of Google or devise a few ricochets for the road ahead.