If the prosecutor had asked me directly the question he asked several other people, I might never have got on the jury at all. He wanted to know how they could tell if someone was lying. Most people said something about eye contact, or evasion, or consistency. I would have said that I often have no idea when someone is lying. I'm so inclined to believe you are telling the truth that you could look me in the eye (or not, even) and say something that makes no sense, and I'd probably believe you.

Maybe I should have spoken up, but I didn't want to get sent to another courtroom and a trial that could have lasted longer. This one, a misdemeanor vandalism case, was supposed to be over in three days. That sounded like a good way to get out of jury duty while still serving the cause. I'm all for doing my duty, as long as the inconvenience is mitigated.

If I'd known I'd have to walk through a driving rainstorm from the parking lot to the courthouse, I would have tried to postpone my jury service. I'd already put it off from November to March, hoping to avoid bad weather. As it turned out, we had a mild, dry winter which ended on the day I was scheduled to report, and by that time it was too late to get out of it.

The next thing you hope, if you're me, is that you get to sit in the courtroom and watch them go through the other fifty people in the jury pool and never get called to sit in the hot seat. If they find a jury quickly enough, you get to go home for a year. That didn't happen this time. I was the fifth one called. I was The Juror in Seat Number Five. And there I stayed, while many others came and went, excused by the judge or the lawyers.

That was the worst part of the process, for me. It was tedious listening to the same questions being asked over and over for almost two full days. And when I say "full days," I mean that court was in session for three hours in the afternoon, period. They seemed like full days, though, in that setting. It was physically exhausting and emotionally draining, and the chairs in the jury box are made for squirming. It's a good thing we had a twenty-minute break in the middle of our three-hour session.

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By the time the trial itself started, I was ready for some action. And then zoom! In three days it was over, and we were left thinking, "Is that it?" Some of us wished we could have asked the witnesses a few questions of our own, just to clarify. But that was it, and I'll let you know more in the next entry. (This is your chance to bail, if you're already regretting I ever got called for jury duty.)

We live in turbulent times, but when have we not? I was a child in the Fifties, but I consider myself a child of the Sixties. Turbulence is the baseline norm for me. The world has gone mad. The country is certifiable. Some of the people in my life are barely holding things together. But, as always, I start the new year with hope. Because really, what other option is there? Ya gotta have hope.

Of course, I started 2011 with miles and miles of hope. January brought us Alexander, the brightest hope imaginable. Aiden and Kylie are the beacons of the family, lighting our way toward a hopeful future. They are way smarter than I ever was, and thankfully they don't know it yet. Lots to learn, but a deep well of compassion and curiosity that will serve them beautifully. And the rest of the family is coping with the turbulence, more or less.

As for me, I'm grateful to be ending the year in one piece — or at least as many pieces as I started with. I'm like an old jigsaw puzzle. A few of my pieces might have got lost along the way, but if you use your imagination you can still make out the big picture. There comes a time in life when "I'm still here" is a victory chant. Every turbulent year I survive gives me the chance to hope for better things ahead.

So now it's on to 2012, and trying to make it the best year we can. I plan to put more effort into doing things right the first time. I plan to stay more connected, and I have an actual plan to put that virtual plan into effect. I also plan to spend more time doing the things I enjoy most, no matter what anyone else thinks. I'll read all the young adult fiction and watch all the sappy, sentimental movies I please, thank you very much. I might even dance around the living room to "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go."

As always, I'm making no specific resolutions, because I don't want to be limited to one day a year of making promises to myself. I start every day of the year thinking I can do better. Sometimes I even succeed. I have my moments, you know. Just today, coming back from the post office, instead of using my special driving language and calling other drivers bad, bad names, I simply chuckled to myself and told them, "You confuse me." That's an improvement, I think.

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New Year's Eve and New Year's Day and the January 2 holiday, whatever it's called (Recuperation Day? Bloody Mary Monday?) are not days I choose to be out amongst the partiers. There are just too many people out there who don't know how to drink and drive well enough to pull it off without smashing into each other, and I don't care to be in the middle of that. My nine-year-old Saturn passed 40,000 miles this week. Does that sound like someone who's likely to be driving around on New Year's Eve? Do the math.

How hard is it to see the world as it really is? And I'm not talking about the grand geopolitical reality cobbled together by people we never actually see in person, done for their own benefit and without giving much thought to the rest of us. They only reason they take us into account at all is the suspicion that if they go too far, we will suddenly realize it and rise up and occupy them.

That is a suspicion that is being tested these days, but my own suspicion is that they are more than equal to the task of surviving whatever we throw at them. Not that we should stop flinging everything we can get out hands on, because after all, you never know. Maybe something somehow, some way, will stick.

It's wise to keep tabs on the movers and shakers in the big world beyond the back yard, but it takes plenty of clear thinking just to keep the back yard from being invaded by gophers and overrun with weeds.

You know, I'm going to be honest here for a minute. When I started writing this, I'm pretty sure I had a point, but whatever it was got lost in a morass of metaphors. What I think I wanted to say was this: How do you know how to live the best life you can when so much of living depends on others, and it's just so darned hard to know other people well enough to see into their hearts?

Believe it or not, there are huge chunks of humanity, billions of people probably, who don't care about that question. Some of them expend all their energy getting through the day, while others live solely by reacting to what happens to them. They're either selfish, which is easy for them but hard on the people around them, or consumed by negative emotion, which is hard on everybody. Much of the world as we know it is fueled by hate, and the only way to escape it is by staying out of the way. Sometimes that doesn't even work.

So now we've dealt with the front page, where something called Newt is suddenly and irrationally important, and the metro section, where you find the names of the nameless people who randomly blow themselves and each other up. Figuratively and literally.

For a thinking person, so much of life is lived internally that you kind of envy the folks in the metro section. It's much easier to react with only self-interest in mind than it is to try to do what's best for everyone, including sometimes people you don't even know. You know what's hard? Empathy is hard. It takes thought. It takes the work of trying to see the world from outside your own head.

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Sometimes you're going to be wrong, make the wrong decision or do the wrong thing. Unknowable, unforeseeable factors get in the way, and you have to retrace your steps and try to find where you veered off the right path. It's exhausting to live this way, but it's the only way to keep your back yard, or whatever tiny patch of ground you inhabit, from being nothing more than a bunch of weeds and gopher holes.