Happy New Year! Hard to believe it’s 2007 already.

Well, first things first. None of you, and I mean NONE of you, used the remaining shopping days after my last post and sent me a gift. Consequently, I have no Favorite Gift this year. Oh, and for the record, I’ve modified my will, with the help of my favorite lawyer. None of you can expect anything when I keel over. Not. One. Red. Cent. If I’m still alive this December 2007, perhaps I’ll be gracious enough to let you try again. Then we’ll see about your *ahem* inheritance. My lawyer gave me lots of gifts, so she’s automatically in my will. So there.

2006 was an interesting year, both personally and in general. Although I’m still looking for ways to reinvent myself and my career, I’m working again, so that’s an improvement. I feel pretty positive about prospects in 2007. After considering the possibility of yet another move, events conspired to keep us here in Los Angeles, where we’ll be for some time to come. 2006 started with a certain amount of uncertainty, then ended with a large amount of certitude. So the certainties of my personal life are far more fixed. I also took my first (and hopefully not my last!) overseas flight, and racked up a few other achievements during the year as well. Oh, yeah, I also blogged a lot.

On the national front, we had an election. What was interesting was the influence on the local level, through individual bloggers. While I’m yet to be convinced that the ascendancy of the Democrats is a sea change, it’s undeniable that political involvement has changed remarkably from the last few elections. I take that as a hopeful sign: People are starting to engage themselves more in what’s going on in the world around them, and to me that is the true sea change. I think as a nation, we go through periods of involvement and self-absorbedness. The 60’s were definitely a time where people tried to actively participate in the world around them; the mid-70’s through about 2000 constituted (to my mind!) a period of navel-gazing, for the most part. Now the pendulum has swung and we’re in a new era. I think 2007 will continue this trend of awakening, of people realizing that they can’t just disengage and abandon their responsibilities to society at large. It will be interesting to see what happens next.

In the realm of the deaf, we had a red-letter year. While I was not a fervently partisan supporter of the protest, I actively supported its goals the best I could from 3000 miles away. While people will long remember the events of May and October at 800 Florida Avenue NE, it’s the changes around the nation that will reverberate much longer. One of those changes was the increase in blog creation, posting, commenting, and general blogging activity. Vlogs were developed and shared globally. The most visible manifestation of this was DeafRead, where this blog is hosted. While a number of blogs that sprang up during this time have since died or foundered by the wayside, there’s a new spirit and a new energy, one that I think will continue for years to come. The discourse created continues in many ways, and I think that will spill over from the cyber realms into real life as more and more of us in DeafBlogLand/the deaf blogosphere become empowered to effect change in our daily lives. In this sense, I think Sonny James nailed it with his brief but effective post on New Year’s Eve. A good resolution, that.

I think it’s happening to an extent already, and I could see evidence of that at the NAD conference in July. There was a sense that we needed to do more, that Gallaudet wasn’t the be-all and end-all; that there was more beyond a college/intellectual beacon that we as a community need to be concerned with. I’m hoping that the new leadership, from Bobbie Beth Scoggins to Robert Davila (who, as most of you know, started his new temp job today), can blaze paths for the rest of us to follow, and to help some among us to become trailblazers in our own right. The blogosphere in general is a fun and exciting place, whether you’re deaf or hearing, but the action, as always, is in “real life,” out there among the rest of the world.

Some things have changed in 2006, and they are now a part of history, whether personal, regional, national, or collective; somethings remained static (at the beginning of 2006, Dear Leader was talking about the need for a new strategy to “win” in Iraq. Fast forward to the last few days, where self-same Dear Leader is talking about the need for a new strategy to “win” in Iraq. Plus c’est la meme chose, plus ça change…). Some things have transcended the arbitrary arrangement we call a calendar, and instead of being what was, or being part of what will be, are fluid subjects and issues we continue to grapple with.

Finally, there’s the promise we get at 00:00:01 each January 1, and that’s the the wonder of what will be. For better or for worse, 2007 is a blank slate, where the future is not yet written.