The New Year
I rang in the new year with my brothers and friends at the Drinking Club . . . until 8:00, then went home and took a short nap, ate pizza, helped clean up the mess from having a dozen kids in the house all afternoon and evening, watched a movie with my wife and Abbie (15), fell asleep during the movie, watched 10 minutes of Dick Clark's rocking Eve, then went to bed. All in all, a nice evening. I'm whipped this morning, but I can rarely sleep past 7:00, regardless of what time I get to bed.
I'm glad today is a Holy Day of Obligation. Church is a nice way to start the new year, and if it weren't obligatory, I doubt I'd make it.
I rarely make New Year resolutions, but I think they're a good idea so I've come up with three: exercise more, drink more tea and less pop, and examine my dominant defect.
Does anybody have any hints for discovering one's dominant defect? I have a (big) handful of candidates, but I'm not even sure they're supposed to be candidates. For instance, can "pride" be the dominant defect? It seems too broad. Every sin stems from pride, and the Fernandez quote (see link in previous paragraph) seems to contemplate a precise fault ("vanity, laziness, impatience, pessimism, a critical spirit"). Then again, he cites as an example that "Some people require more fortitude." That would seem to imply that any disposition that runs counter to the four cardinal virtues (gluttony, recklessness, fear, injustice) could be one's dominant defect, even though it's more of an attitude than a specific character trait (if that makes sense . . . I'm struggling with terminology here).
Any advice, opinions, links, or reading suggestions on this issue are greatly appreciated.
TDE finished the year with over 200,000 visitors: on average, the site received 16,930 visitors every month, many of them repeat visitors. On average, 7,857 different persons came every month. I have no way of discerning how many are dedicated readers and how many merely click on the site by accident or, worse, are just "bots" that hit the site as part of a search engine. If I had to guess, I'd say that, on average, about 4,000-5,000 people came to the site intentionally every month, but that's just a wild stab on my part, based loosely on little things I've read here and there over the past five years. Either way, they're good figures.
May many blessings come your way during the New Year. My 2009 was not good. It was primarily marred by the death of my father, but other things went wrong as well. It easily ranks as the worst year of my life. For that, I'm grateful. And I'm oddly optimistic about 2010. I'm not sure why. We'll see.
