Resolutions 2011

Answer: “2010 was awesome, and I wouldn’t trade it for the world, but…. next year’s gonna be a little different”.

Question: What I just muttered to myself, alone in my room, the only one awake in this echoey house at almost two in the morning.

I had a really, really tearful night the other night.  Couldn’t sleep, did a lot of reflecting and talking to myself, and finally switched the light on and scribbled a short list of resolutions for the new year.  I have never, never, never made resolutions before in my LIFE.  No, not ever.  But this night, it just felt like something that needed to be done, and for what it’s worth, I fell right to sleep after I made the list.  Here they are.

I Resolve To

1.  do some reflecting and some really hard thinking in the first few days of the year.  Huh.  Looking back now, I view this first resolution as a means to some sort of end; I want to figure out a little bit more of who I am, and find some ramshackle way of being happy and comfortable with that.  I guess that night, what stood out to me most was just that this action needed to be done, even if I didn’t know why particularly I wanted to do it.  But I promise I will, and I promise there will be a post about it.  It makes my chest tight to think about, because I think I know that there are some hard truths for me to face up to in the coming days, but I need to do it, and putting it down here will help me get those thoughts in order and lend them more permanence.

2. eat more fruits and veggies and keep walking.  The fruits and veggies thing is a perennial resolution that I’m forever making (along with just about everyone else in the world, I’m aware).  The walking thing is a manifestation of my internal struggle over whether or not to get a parking pass for second semester.  Not as intimate, deep, or potentially life-changing as number one, but I still aim to try.

3.  become the girl who reads at work again.  You only wanna know the people who are into her.  Completely tied to number one.  Referencing the fact that I read all summer at work, instead of flirting with people I am actively aware are nogoodniks and only want in my pants.  A lot of the reflecting I have to do in the first few days of 2011 is about how I present myself at work and how I interact with coworkers, because that’s one of the things that’s changed most about me in the last year.  Apparently, I did enough reflecting the night I wrote this list to realize that I want to be a little quieter and stick to myself more in my last four months working there.  Also, this is a killer way to get things crossed off my book list.

4. try harder to be better.  A better sister, daughter, friend, roommate, employee, student, human.  Kinder, more patient, sweeter, more loving, harder working.  You’re kind of lazy and you know it.  Just work on it.  I like the fact that I was very sweet and gentle with myself: here are the facts about you, self; I’m not saying completely change or throw your personality out like the trash, I’m just saying make that effort to raise the bar a bit.  And it’s true.  I’ve become more and more aware lately that I’m awfully spoiled, selfish, and rather lazy, and I know that if I work on erasing those traits or minimizing them, I will become a better all the above.  Plan of action yet to be determined, though.

5. write more.  Nuff said.  But really, I always feel guilty about going on writing jags here where a month or so will be chock full of posts, and then nothing appears for two more.  I said it before, and I think I’m willing to firmly and formally commit to it here: three posts a month, at least.  Hopefully quality posts, and not just two lines about my new shoes or something, but we’ll see.  12 months is a looooong time.

6. try and be braver.  Trust others, make things right with the people you need to, face the future with optimism, a sense of self-efficacy, and your chin up.  I also find it very sweet that I had specific things in mind when I wrote each item in that list, but found a way to turn what were extremely precise scenarios in my head into something more typically resolution-like on paper.  Trust others?  That’s a thing about a boy, yup.  Make things right, etc?  A call to patch up a soured friendship that’s been gnawing at me for months.  And the optimism thing?  Totally about grad school, and totally (and at the time, inadvertantly, honestly) a paraphrase of Elle Woods’ graduation speech.  I am really a wuss when it comes to so many things.  I guess this could have been combined with number four, but there must have been a sense that night that this, in particular, was an issue that needed my full concentration.

And so that’s it.  Six items, each as daunting as the one before it.  But when I look over this list it doesn’t scare me, it doesn’t intimidate me.  It makes me feel hopeful and happy and light.  This is right.  These are going to guide me.  And, if in December I’m sitting here shaking my head at my naivete, that’s fine, too.  I’ll take all that for these moments now when these items are encouraging me and giving me some sense of light heading into 2011.

A Year In The Life: Jan-Jun 2010

So!  Time again to recap another year.  Usually, doing these posts, I’ve found that chopping things up by calendar year is really helpful and efficient, but not this time.  If you’ll recall, 2009 ended in a bit of a mess, and it’s sad to say, but that mess sort of seamlessly transitioned into 2010, so at least this time, the calendar year divide doesn’t fit the frame of my experience so well.  I know it’s played out to say, but the end of December and beginning of January were all a blur: of phone calls, worry, hospital rooms, and tears.  And ohhhh the endless conversations.  The arguing, updating, comforting, explaining.  I thought, therefore, that getting back up to BG and back to school would ease my mind.  Ha.  HahahahahahaHAAAA.  You know, one of the best parts of writing these recaps is that I get to look back at just how idiotic and naive I was the year before.  I never fail to bring it on that front, let me tell you.  And boooooy did I ever start this year off with one stupid assumption, Bubba.  I hit the end of my driveway, burst into tears, and my week did not really improve from there.  I got off to a great start at work by getting written up my first night back, and came home from work only to hear that my brother-in-law had been officially diagnosed with MS that day.  At the time, he and my sister had only been married for eight months.  They were still newlyweds.  I remember spending practically all of the next morning crying.  I woke up, got ready for the day, and then sat down on the futon and wept.  I’m talking black tears, raccoon eyes, snotty tissues, full-on meltdown.  It was then that I decided to go spend the weekend, my first official, yay!-we’re-back-at-school-let’s-party weekend at home in Dayton.  Things had just been so relentlessly, all-goddamn-consumingly awful and out of my control lately, and what I thought would help hadn’t and I was finally just at a loss.  So, I took the weekend, regrouped, and came back pretending that the semester was just starting.  And the cool thing is… it worked.

Thank the fucking LORD for that, because this has all been so awfully dreary, hasn’t it?  I mean, I’ve literally been procrastinating writing this non-mandatory piece because shit got so rough.  I wanted to skip all the ugly bits and just get to April and May, the best months of the year (so far, at least; I’m writing this part at the end of July).  But I’ve definitely learned that you gotta take the bad with the good, and that a lot of times the bad comes all at once, but a lot of other times, the good does, too.  Which brings us to the rest of this recap….

Well, almost.  Poor February.  It’s kind of like the bastard red-headed stepchild month of my years, it seems.  I NEVER remember details from February.  Seriously.  This is getting comical.  I just scoured Facebook for pictures from February to jog my memory and found TWO.  So here’s the only thing I KNOW happened in February ’10: my future (now current) roommate designed some sort of environmental promotional banner that was to be displayed in Toledo, and we went to the gallery opening of all the banner winners.  Scintillating stuff.  Actually, though, it was fun to go and mingle and be in and amongst a crowd that I literally have NO contact with on a day-to-day basis.  I also know that during February, my roommate was in the midst of a tailspin brought on by a bad breakup; I was starting to worry that she had changed so completely and was no longer the person I had committed to living with for eight months the spring before, so I was generally pretty unhappy in that relationship on top of everything else still plaguing me from Christmas Break and the semester before.  (UPDATE from November: I just got an email from myself written back in February, and I wrote about the stupidest shit.  Like, should I kiss this boy or not?  The Nanny.  Where I was going to dinner that night.  Well, and also how I was still pretty unhappy and trying to root myself on and pull myself out of it.  But, you know, aside from that.  Just junk.)  However, March is when things all start to really, truly turn around and take off and get good and fun, so let’s head that way, shall we?

Spring Break was really when life did a 180.  I had planned on going to Vermont to visit a friend, but it fell through at the last minute; thankfully, I had a back-up plan.  I instead spent a few days in a cabin in the mountains of Tennessee overlooking a huge lake with my roommate and some of her friends from home and some of their friends.  Essentially, a group of people who all barely knew each other.  But it was ok, because we got along great and spent our days doing Jesus jigsaw puzzles, boating, and playing video games, and our nights drinking and playing cards.  It was incredibly relaxing, incredibly fun, and incredibly beautiful, and I don’t know, maybe there are some serious supernatural forces at work in them thar hills or something, because this is when my roommate and I effectively switched lives.  It was some seriously Freaky Friday shit.  She pulled up and out of her downward spiral of partying and drunken debauchery, and I dove headfirst into mine.  Honestly, I turned 21 a week after break, and spent the next solid six months drinking.  I believe there was ONE weekend, JUST ONE, in which I did not have a drop to drink between Spring Break and mid-September, and that was the weekend where I dressed up like a prostitute to appear in a movie.  Yes, I could elaborate on that plot point, but I’m going to leave you wondering.  Classy, I know, I know,  but also?  SO FUCKING FUN.  I think I can attribute at least part of my descent into constant drunkenness to a new friendship.  Except, it’s not like an after-school special kind of friendship where I was getting pressured into drinking so that I could hang out with the cool kids.  We just kind of fell in together at exactly the right time to produce some of the MOST extraordinary months of my life.

April.  Ohhhhhh April.  Favorite month of the year, undoubtedly.   Here’s why.  Firstly (but not necessarily most inportantly), it was at this point in my life that I had managed to strike the delicate balance between being a total co-worker flirt without actually being a make-out slut.  I was toeing a fine line, juuuuust managing to stay upright on the balance beam.  I had baby crushes on a few boys I worked with, and was really just relishing in them when April started.  And then I got SLOPPY drunk on April Fools’ Day.  The fool was played by your truly that night, that’s for goddamn sure.  Kissed someone I shouldn’t have in front of someone I should have, was witnessed easily by several coworkers because I was in the middle of an EMPTY dancefloor, and went on to be falling-over drunk at a diner with said coworkers, out til four in the morning.  Auspicious.  And I feel like I spent my whole month that way.  Wasted.  Thursday nights became my favorite, running into co-workers out became my favorite, hell, KISSING co-workers became my favorite, being teased at work for my drunken antics became my favorite.  It’s kind of embarrassing to look back now and see how I totally just drank it all in, so obviously enjoying it, but it really, really was making me happy.  Whatever.  You live, you learn, right?  Just wait til I tell you about fall.  I’m a little bit more grown up now, I swear.  And it’s not like I ever really lost myself in all of it; I remember one night in particular, when I heard some particular shit that had been talked about me, and just worked myself up into a frenzy of righteous indignation adn was like, “Oh, let’s motherfucking GO!  I will pull my shit together like you have never before SEEN, assholes!”  I didn’t, not fully, anyway, but just knowing that at least I hadn’t turned into those trashy “haters ‘gon hate” kind of girls is comforting now.  Hum.  I kind of lost the framing technique I was using at the beginning of this paragraph.  Them’s my writing skills for ya.

It’s really interesting to compare the first and last days of April.  So similar.  Kissing a co-worker, getting wasted, late night food run, HILARIOUS stories to recount the next day.  And so May came in on a tide of alcohol and end-of-school stress.  It broke my heart to be packing up and leaving my room and my beautiful roommate.  I hadn’t really felt at home there at all during fall, but spring was treating me so right that life had morphed into something so easy and pleasant and safe, and summer was so up in the air and scary.  My last night there my best friend surprised me by coming up and helping me pack, clean, and move, and then by being game to go out and get shitfaced with all my co-workers whom she had never met.  Best. 

And the hosue I moved to….. was so utterly perfect.  Exactly the kind of place I needed to be, and the type of experience I needed to have the summer before senior year of college.  I said it so exactly right in my summer recap, that I have never before had a place become home to me so quickly.  The first week or so was trying, but then I realized how extraordinary my roommates were, how fun summertime can be when you’re 21 in a nearly-deserted college town, and how easily I could strike a balance between BG and Dayton.  And that’s just what I did: spent weeks in BG, sleeping late every day, being absolutely lazy, watching Grey’s, playing cards, reading, TFunding, loving my roommates.  And then, come Friday, I’d roll out of bed and throw some clothes in a suitcase and head to Dayton til Monday afternoon for some special event, party, birthday, what have you.

June, for me, was the month where it really started to hit me over the head how happy I was.  I really became aware of it with every fiber of my being more and more often, and I think the posting I did here reflects that.  Therefore, I started to spend a couple more weekends in BG living it up, which led to (dun dun DUNNNN) my first of MANY Four Loko nights.  Looking back, it’s ridiculously weird (and also probably a saving grace, let’s be real) that I hadn’t been drinking them all spring to fuel my adventures.  Because adventures they most assuredly led to.  The first night I had one was probably one of my favoite nights of the summer.  Just your typical overly-happy, wastedddddd, dancing college girl in a dress at the bars.  It felt special to me, like those nights always feel special to the girls living them.  Sweet summertime.  And of course, one of my most beautiful memories of summer 2010 was just watching the sun rise on the last day of June with my roommate who had quickly become one of my best friends, and realizing just how good 2010 was treating me, and being so, so thankful, and so, so ready for more.

Things, And Things

• Hi.  Once again, it’s been over a month.  I’m making New Year’s Resolutions, and one of them is going to be to post here at least three times a month.  If it kills me.  Goddamnit. 
• I’m at home for Christmas break, and it still hasn’t sunk in that I’m allowed to have a night like this where I just bum aound in sweats and read salacious gossip and think about what books I’m going to read for pleasure.  I don’t have discussion questions to answer or data to analyze or a textbook I should be reading or a paper I should be thinking up a topic for or a class to attend that’s so hard for me to get that it’s begun to diminish my sense of self-worth?  CHRISTMAS MIRACLE.
• I finally figured out last night that I do not, in fact, want to get into a Master’s Psych program somewhere, and I’ve never felt more positive about my future.
• I have yet to start my Christmas shopping.
• I haven’t been good solid drunk in a good solid few weeks.  Look who’s finally turning into a girl headed for grad school.  Kind of.
• I really want to watch Breakfast at Tiffany’s someday soon.
• WHICH REMINDS ME, I have the beginnings of a Life List compiled.  I was on a super Life List kick over the summer, and then that sort of dwindled when I had that class that made me hate my life and I started to become more and more convinced I wasn’t going to get into grad school.  I started thinking nothing on that list would ever actually become a reality, and got really turned off of it.  However, now that it’s break and my mind is starting to relieve itself of some seriously warped misconceptions, I want to start posting ten or so items at a time from my list with my reasoning behinf them.  I think it’ll give me the kick-start I need.
• One of my best friends is drunk-texting me from BG right now, and DAMN, I already miss that town.
• This Christmas and New Year’s are going to be SO much better than last Christmas and New Year’s.  2010, I love you.