12 Sentences from the Past for the New Year

I spent the day cleaning out the basement, so I haven't had much time to write something for the first day of the new year. Inspired by Michael Leddy at Orange Crate Art (who was in turn inspired by another blogger), today's post is made up of the first sentence of the first post from each month in 2009.

Michael says it's an exercise in parataxis, one of those lovely Greek terms I never managed to learn during my years as an English major:

A couple of my friends recently added themselves as fans of Wendell Berry on their Facebook profiles. In the early '90s, I attended a design conference that had Chip Kidd as a speaker. As a little girl, I played with Barbies. Now that I've finished Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations, I'm recommending it to anyone who has an interest in the ways things have been changing lately -- the death of the newspaper, the rise of social media, the shift in how politics operates, and more. I almost choked when I heard about the Wall Street Journal story that said over 450,000 Americans are making a decent living by blogging. I've posted before about the strange iconography of diaper-changing tables, mostly ones I saw while on a cross-country drive. From the land of LOLcats comes GraphJam.com, in which users submit graphs on any topic that pleases them, and other users vote on the best ones. What a combination -- an authentic 19th century horse hitching post, funky vernacular lettering, and an easily misreadable message (they have baby goats for sale, in case you were wondering if you should call child protective services). I'm generally not a big fan of vanity plates, but I liked this one. Today's Star Tribune celebrated the 40th anniversary of the paper's Taste section. I love the mapping of food customs and language conventions related to food (like my long-ago post about the usage of soda vs. pop). Knowing I would be in Flatbush, I did a little research to see what might be off the beaten path, and found out that Erasmus Hall high school is on the north end of the neighborhood.

Whew. I sure talk about myself a lot. Perhaps in 2010 I can resolve to stop using "I" quite so much.