Here's to 2011, I suppose

Truth be told, 2010 was not a very good year, and I expect little better -- maybe even worse -- from 2011. But the advantage of low expectations is that they're relatively easy to meet.

Kind of like this: My wife used to ask me how my day went, and my standard answer was "OK." "Why only OK?," she'd ask. To which I'd say: "What's wrong with OK? There's nothing wrong with OK. OK is a perfectly respectable and acceptable condition. Why must I gin up false enthusiasm for a day that was much like every other day, a day in which nothing truly spectacular or disastrous happened?"

Needless, to say, she doesn't ask how my day was anymore.

Let me be clear: I am not kvetching. I am blessed well beyond what I deserve. I have my health and a wonderful family with a loving wife and terrific, bright, beautiful children, all of whom who love me despite a multitude of personal quirks and flaws. These include, but are not limited to, an incorrigible fetish for wordplay; a tendency to doze off the moment I stop moving, even mid-conversation or on my feet; such incomprehension of what my daughters tell me sometimes that they have to repeat themselves, slowly and often, before it sinks in and even then I often fake understanding, and they know it. Also, I have an annoying propensity -- I call it a gift -- for finding lines from "Seinfeld" and Coen brothers movies to fit almost any occasion, or to recite them even if they don't fit.

Finally, and at long last to the point I'm here to make, I draw a steady paycheck from a job that allows me to do what I do best at least some of the time, if much less than I'd like. Although its future is very uncertain, for the moment it holds. And the moment is all we're promised, right? And only barely that.

Good health, wonderful family, full employment. Not bad. Now, granted if I could calibrate that mix a bit, I might accept slightly worse health -- a minor limp, say, or a broken nose that never quite heals right -- or a slightly less-attractive C-average child in exchange for more job security. But it doesn't work that way, does it? And if you really try to seek that kind of deal, you might end up in the middle of "The Monkey's Paw." So don't even go there.

Granted, at 20, I fully expected by the age of 50 -- which I'll turn this year -- to be a political correspondent for The Washington Post or rock-music critic for The New York Times. That neither happened is surely for the best, as I likely would have been laid off by now, such is the state of that business.

Instead, in a line from Drew Carey's old TV show, I have a position of indirect respect and oblique power.

Of course, many people -- most, in fact, if one thinks globally -- have it worse than me. I've seen friends and colleagues lose jobs in the last couple of years; though all have landed on their feet in one way or another, most are a little wobbly-kneed for the experience. One said to me: "They always say 'it's not personal.' Anyone who says that has never been laid off."

Most of my friends are in either the newspaper business or non-tenured positions at public universities. Both are tenuous perches in today's economy.

I hope to hang on in my current job, but I keep eyes open for other options. Perhaps this blogging thing will pay off for me yet with, say, a bidding war between the Post offering me a political blog and the Times offering a rock-music blog. You know, I believe I could do both -- and in my underwear, too.

Or there's the option I read about in the local paper recently -- a religious group described as an "organization of contemplative hermits." Leaving aside the question of whether it's even possible to organize hermits, I imagine this work doesn't pay very well, if at all. And the expectation that you're going to spend hours every day contemplating sounds a little burdensome. "Hey, you," the boss would yell. "Are you contemplating or just sitting there?"

So, 2011 begins with a certain nervous uncertainty for many of us. 365 days. Or, as Jerry Seinfeld might say, you subtract showers and meals, it's like 100 days.

You're darn tootin', as Jerry Lundegaard would put it.

To friends and colleagues near and far, here's to the New Year. May it be OK.