Resolutions 2011: How I Did; And, Resolutions 2012

Aaaaaah, hey, so remember these?  That was 365 days ago!  Man, I simultaneously do and do not want it to be last year again.  2011 was fucking awesome, mostly, which I’ll tell you all about one day in my year-end recap, but for now, let’s just recap those resolutions and see how they turned out!

1.  do some reflecting and some really hard thinking in the first few days of the year.  First few days of the year?  This was more like ALL OF THEY YEAR, EVERY DAY, ALL THE TIME.  I think now, after this year, I finally and fully understand the term “navel-gazing”.  What can I say, I think about myself a lot.  But really, I said then that I wanted to learn more about who I am and figure out how to be more comfortable with that, and whoooooooo GIRL.  Thanks, 2011, you can throw up that “Mission Accomplished” banner now.  I think I not only grew, but really liked who I was growing into, more in these past twelve months than ever before.  And fortunately, I think grad school and my program will only facilitate more of that in 2012.

2. eat more fruits and veggies and keep walking.  The fruits and veggies thing was hit or miss.  Summer was weird, and I didn’t feel at home, so I spent a lot of time avoiding the common areas like the kitchen and hiding in my room, snacking on things that were bad for me.  Things have gotten better.  The walking thing was a big old FAILURE.

3.  become the girl who reads at work again.  You only wanna know the people who are into her.  Hmmmm.  I did read at work more, but I still managed to kiss inappropriate people and feel vexed by my coworkers and my interactions with them until the bitter end.  Mostly, the problem was there weren’t really any people at work who wanted to know and hang with a girl who read.  I worked with typical a-hole college kids, is why.

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 certainly didn’t make a concentrated effort every day (see mention of laziness, above), but I think I had moments where I would catch myself being uncharitable or awful and try and work on it.  This one, though, is, and probably will remain for a very long time, a work in progress.

5. write more.  I made it my mission one year ago today to write at least three posts per month here, just to keep myself chronicling my life, for my own sake, and reflecting, and de-stressing, and I’m so fucking proud of myself for doing it (as of this post!) that I wish it were possible to do some sort of running high-five with me.  Go Team!

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  The trust thing is…..still a thing.  I made things right with the person with whom they weren’t, and it didn’t blow up in my face, and that’s mostly due to this other person’s generosity and good humor.  The optimism/self-efficacy/upwardly-pointing chin thing didn’t happen so much, but hey, things still turned out really well, so perhaps in the future I should REMEMBER THAT, huh, self??

So, overall, things were spotty, but mostly completed.  2011 was such a great year, with some rough patches here and there, and I’m really hoping things can continue at an even keel in 2012.  I don’t have as thoughtful or profuse hopes for next year, just a few general resolutions that have been floating around in my mind, so here they are.

1.  I want to read more.  I’ve tried and tried to make myself quantify this one somehow, but I can’t.  I don’t want to say “x number of books per month” because what if I try (again) to read Anna Karenina?  That shit’s a doorstop, yo!  So, instead, in my mind, this is more like, “read at your own pace, several nights a week, even if it’s just for ten minutes, but for the love of God, READ, and don’t stop”.

2.  Cook more.  Or learn more cooking-type activities?  I don’t cook.  Grilled cheese was a fucking revelation when I finally mastered it.  This year, I’ve got a few easy things I can make that still really surpass my super-low-bar standards (chicken salad, devilled eggs), but for 2012, I think I’d like to try actually, I don’t know, baking things?  Putting things in the stove for a pre-determined amount of time, and then taking them out when they’re golden-brown and ready to eat (aside from frozen pizzas, don’t worry, those are my bitches)?  Perhaps I will chop things.  And season!  I’d like to know how to properly season!  And….cook meat?  I think I could bake a potato easily enough, but broiling a steak sounds harder than getting a phD at this point.  Basically what I’m sayin’ is, the art which we call cooking is something upon which I would like to improve…forthwith.  Posthaste.  Henceforth.

3.  Embrace my program more fully.  You guys, though, seriously, you would be so impressed about how much I contribute to class.  Like, I’m legitimately pretty sure that there were people in some of my undergrad classes who probably thought I was an actual mute, but now you can’t shut me up.  In some classes, at least.  So, more of that.  That is good.  Also, developing more rapport (ah, look at me with my counseling lingo) with professors and peers, get involved perhaps, and be less lazy about reading/writing for class.  Oooooh, that is setting the bar perilously high for me, you don’t even know.  2011 was a record year for laziness, especially the latter half.

4.  Be a better person in general.  This, much like last year’s resolution, encompasses a lot of things, and isn’t something I can say I definitely finished when the year is over.  It’s a lifetime of work.  Patience, charity, basic kindness and understanding, but also, belief in myself, confidence, feeling comfortable in my own skin.  That’s a big bill, huh?

5.  Well, it worked last year, so I think I’ll amp it up just a bit here for 2012: write four times a month, at least.  That’s at least once a week, you guys!  That is so much, for someone who has a life.  BUT, happily, I don’t, so it should be no problem.  Ba-dum-chhhhh.  No but really, it’s fun to write when I’m happy, and soothing to write when I’m sad/nervous/angry/frustrated/lonely, so I want to keep at it.  I think in fifty years I’ll be glad I did, and what’s even the point of making a resolution if you can’t say that about it?

My Saturday night so far has consisted of looking up house plants online (FOR MY NEW APARTMENT IN ATHENS OMG, but that’s a whole separate post) and bickering with my mother about whether or not we own Anastasia on VHS.  I don’t…even have any commentary to add to that.

Summertime Strugglin’

Update update updaaaaaaaaaate time!  Things that are worrying me: grad school, registering for classes, finding a place to live, getting a loan to pay for all of this, being out of work for three weeks and thus getting broker, and also my computer got a virus two nights ago, greattttt.  Things that are making me feel a tiny bit better: hazelnut iced coffee, Pete and Trudy Campbell looking down at me from my Mad Men calendar, roommate H. sleeping on my couch tonight, Robyn’s “Be Mine”, and the prospect of the pool tomorrow.  I almost think I’m breaking even.

A Year In The Life, Part Two

Alright!  I am motherfuckin’ determined to get this posted MUCH earlier than last year’s part two.  Fall ’10 is so much happier to write about than fall ’09, so that helps the process.

July was largely spent in Dayton when my BG job went on hiatus for a few weeks.  During those three weeks home, I came to a few realizations: this was probably the last solid amount of time I would ever spend working at Coldstone, and also the last solid amount of time I would spend living in my childhood home.  Both of those things simultaneously wrench at my gut and feel right to me.  I didn’t fit in with the high schoolers at Coldstone and was increasingly just short on patience with my boss, and home just seemed lackluster compared to BG.  Probably because I was in the midst of the best summer of my life here, and didn’t appreciate the interruption to go home, work a job with coworkers I didn’t really care to know, live with my parents instead of my roommates, and spend quiet nights in instead of at college bars.  Not so shocking, then, to have the reaction I had.  The majority of my July was actually spent away from BG, come to think of it.  I drank a bit with friends from home, spent the first part of the month in Dayton like I mentioned, and the last two weekends in Kentucky visiting my sister and in Michigan at a family member’s Christmas tree farm.  Yes, you read that right.  It was AWESOME.  I went tubing for the first time in Kentucky, and four-wheeling for the first time in Michigan, and loved both.  I feel like those are some quintessential Midwestern summertime distractions, right there.  Garsh.  August was a weird month of waiting for things.  The first two weeks were my final two weeks at my beautiful summer home, and I spent them alternately eagerly anticipating moving into my new apartment and holding on like hell to the place and people I was with.  And then I spent the first week in my new apartment lonesome for my summer house and my new roommate, who spent the whole week working all day, and waiting, waiting, waiting for classes to start.  And then, BAM, I was a senior.

Once my other roommate moved in and the school year kicked off, I settled in really quickly.  Summer, as a season, was winding down, but still infusing my first few weeks of school with so much sunshiney bliss.  I guess it helps that I fell rapidly in love with my roommates, as well.  I wore a dress every day for the first week of classes.  Someone professed their deep and intense crush on me, and then left for Europe.  The feeling was not mutual; in fact, I was so weirded out that I shut that person out of my life entirely.  Sometimes I’m kind of a dick.  Don’t worry, though!  Things are better now!  But that’s for next year’s recap.  Late August and early September are practically indistinguishable in my mind.  It was all just breezey warmth, learning my routine, starting to figure out what the year was going to be like.  Mid-September, my grandmother passed away.  Ugh, I remember that morning so clearly.  The texts from my sister implying something was wrong, until I just snapped “WHAT is going on?”  Crying alone in my room, before I told anyone.  My half-hearted attempt to cheer myself up by going to the football game.  It was so terrible.

Fortunately, things did look up from there.  I did not descend into the depths of despair.  The rest of September was a little gray, but October really livened things up.  I think I managed to drink every weekend, despite being the sickest I’ve been in a while mid-month.  I know I started the month off terribly.  TERRIBLY.  Let’s not revisit the decision I made that night.  I kissed at least three different coworkers this month, so you know it was a shitshow.  I think we can measure the stability of my life in any given month by the number of coworkers I kiss therein.  SCIENCE.  Anyway, October, hummmmm, hewwww hawwwww.  God, I think this is the shortest year in review segment I’ve ever written.  It’s not that October wasn’t good, or that first semester wasn’t good, it’s just that second semester was SO MUCH BETTER.  I don’t even give a shit about October, I wanna talk about January and February!  That’s when the real adventures were!  But, okay, focus, focus.  Fall break happened.  It started out really promisingly, with a visit to one of my best lady friends in Cincinnati, where men ten years older than us tried to pick us up at the bar and what we drunkenly thought were members of an opposing campaign (my friend was an intern on a Senate race) ate in a booth behind us at a diner at 3 AM.  Duh, we tried to spy on them.  We were drunk, so I don’t think it was spying so much as me leaning back verrrrrry obviously and then whispering everything I could hear back to my friend across the table.  And then I went home for a few days, got in a HUGE fight with my dad about green olives because my life is funny that way, and drove back to BG angry.

Halloween weekend was one of my favorite weekends of senior year.  The Halloweens of my freshman, sophomore, and junior years were, respectively, the first time I ever kissed a boy at/got drunk at college, completely unmemmorable, and relatively underwhelming with a side of regret.  But this year, we (and every time I say “we”, I’m most likely referring to my roommates and best friend A.) went out and went hard Thursday, Friday, Saturday.  My favorite part, which I didn’t tell anyone about, was drunkenly holding hands with the guy I liked on Saturday’s walk home.  We got lost, peed in a front yard, A. knocked over a mailbox on a post, and all went our separate ways eventually.  This is kind of a bittersweet memory now, but again, that’s something for the Spring ’11 recap.  And then November rolled in.

One of my favorite people, my friend C., came up to visit just when I needed someone around to whom I could confess this burgeoning crush I had goin’ on.  She was in a remarkably similar situation, and it was incredibly comforting to me just to hear her story.  We were ladies unlucky in love together that weekend.  Then I went to a concert with said crush, and….MISTAKE.  My darling roommate H. has a hypothesis that it’s dangerous territory to listen to songs you love with or start to recognize the smell of the guy you like, because that’s when the heartstrings REALLY start to get tangled, and….yep.  That’s all I can say.  Yep.  I was a bit lovelorn in November.  But I don’t mean to make this sound more serious than it really was, because I still managed to flirt with some bad-idea people and crush on yet another coworker (this one the worst idea of all, no lies). 

Jesus.  From the way I write in these recaps, you’d think all I ever did was flirt and make out with coworkers and develop crushes that go nowhere.  I promise you, in November I did do some positive, productive things.  I fucking rocked out on the GRE!!!  I scheduled myself a much-needed haircut!  AND my classes for the spring!  What else, what else.  November seems pretty unmemorable, too, which is frustrating because I know I was happy and the world felt sweet, I just can’t remember any of the specifics.  I was listening to crappy music, spending time at the summer home, seeing movies for cheap, going to classes and doing homework, TFunding.  Regular life.  OK, so I did some Facebook excavating, and also roommate M. and I were really obsessed in November with that one AFLAC commercial with the goat, too.  So there’s your random memory for the month.  Thanksgiving was lovely but uneventful.  I went, as I have for the past I-don’t-know-how-many years, to the Christmas tree lighting in downtown Dayton, and then got STUPID drunk by ten that night and confessed that huge crush to A., who was a mutual friend of the guy and me.  OK, so December.  I got a haircut, I drank some wine, I went to an Ugly Christmas Sweater party, I kissed a pretty consistent KUI, and struggled through finals week.  Roommate M. actually needed emergency transporting home mid-finals-week, which led to my first all-nighter of senior year.  That was an eerie night.  All of us had been in our beds, but none of us had been sleeping when the bad news hit.  We drove her halfway, to be picked up by a family friend, and then roommate H. and I drove home in the wee small hours of the morning, wailing along with Tegan and Sara, and ate breakfast together while the sun rose.  I had a paper to finish, she had a final to study for.  Shortly thereafter, we had finally, mercifully made it to Christmas break.  And within a few days, I had figured out my future in more clearly defined ways than ever before, so that was neat.  I feverishly shopped for Christmas, loved on my family, got in a lot of good sister time, and was overall a decently happy girl.  Nevertheless, I was still overjoyed to come back to BG for a night on December 31st.  I spent the day with A. shopping for dresses, and then started drinking.  I was a little blue welcoming in 2011, because of that GODDAMNED crush, but not to worry!  In just a few days, life got AWESOME and so so so so much happier than I realized was possible.  I thought, throughout all of fall semester, that I knew what happy was, but the fall just doesn’t even compare when I think about the last five months.  Stay tuned for 2011, Part I, y’all, cause everything got SO GOOD.

A History Of Intoxication

A few weekends ago I celebrated my 22nd birthday.  I was really excited for all the festivities that ensued, but honestly, I was a little hesitant, too.  The past year, pretty much from the day after my last birthday, has been the happiest of my life, easily.  I made new and better relationships, I spent a summer living in BG, I moved into my first apartment, I started to actually actively enjoy going to my job, I fell rapidly in love with my roommates, and I went out much, much more.  Don’t get me wrong- there have definitely been mistakes made, heartaches, losses, tears, fights, and disappointments.  I’m just so much better equipped to handle all of the above than ever before, and the good has far outweighed the bad, like to a ridiculous degree.  And of course I also realize that it’s not like I only get some finite amount of happiness- one year and that’s it, it’s over.  I know that I’ll probably continue to be just as happy at 22 as I was at 21, but this is the first 365 days of my life, from birthday to birthday, that I can remember not having a significant blue period; in fact, this is the first year that I have been acutely aware from day to day and week to week how blissfully happy I was.  Sometime around June, I started realizing just what a good year I was having, and began chronicling my weekends, since those tended to be when the most adventures happened.  And so I bring to you today, without further ado, my year’s most memorable, fun, or just all out wild weekends:

• March 19th:  My 21st birthday was actually kind of a mess, and not the joyful occasion I had been looking forward to; thankfully, the next night a few friends from home came up to BG and took me out and got me properly wasted.  It was a beautiful shitshow of a night.
• April 1st:  April Fools’ Day.  This is kind of the kick-off of a spree of heavy (for a girl who went out probably about five times throughout fall semester) drinking on my part that lasted allllll the way through summer.  I made stupid decisions, had Corner Grill, a local haven for hungry drunks, for the first time, and mildly regretted my life the next morning.
• May 7th: This was quite possibly one of my favorite days of the past year.  I woke up in my empty, lonely dorm room, did a half-ass job on a take-home final, then started packing up my things to move out to my summer home.  My best friend from home called and announced her intention to come up and drink with me that night.  She arrived just in time to help me pack my car for the haul across town, and just as we shut the last load up in my backseat, the tornado sirens starting wailing.  It was barely spitting rain, so we looked at each other, shrugged, and said “Eh, let’s just start driving”.  We piled all of my shit in my new room in a new house, changed, and headed to dinner and the bars, where an all-out end of the year party was taking place.  There were many shots taken, many co-workers drunkenly clutched at, and someone that looked like Tiger Woods hit on my new roommate’s 18-year-old sister.  Summer had officially begun.
• June 18th-19th: My absolute FAVORITE summer weekend.  Also, incidentally, the first weekend I had Four Lokos.  It’s probably for the best that they revamped the drink and took out the caffeine.  That Friday night, we weren’t even sure we were going to go out.  It had been storming all evening, the tornado sirens were going off again, and the sky was the color of a four-day-old bruise.  However, things had cleared up by about 11:00, so we threw on sandals and sundresses, went to a party to play flip cup with the aforementioned Four Lokos, danced like maniacs, lost the key to my car, threw up in front of the city’s courthouse, recorded drunken videos, nearly concussed myself with our shower curtain rod, drunkenly solicited a boy I had had a crush on, and laid in my bed all day Sunday nursing a hangover and watching the World Cup.  Weekend of epic proportions.
• July 8th: We developed this bad habit over the summer of running through a fountain on campus at the end of our drunken nights, and around the middle of the summer, the BG cops started to realize this.  That was why, this night, the water in the fountain was blue.  The Four Loko is why, this night, I didn’t realize it and woke up with a white skirt with blue swaths all over it.  And that blue fountain water was why, this night, I slipped, ripped open a rather long strip of foot skin, and limped around for literally the next two weeks.  That’s now one of my favoite scars.
• August 27th: It was the weekend after classes started, and I got a ride to the bars on the handlebars of a French man’s bicycle.  Let that sink in for a moment.  I took jaeger bombs with my roommate’s business fraternity, went to a party for international students, and kissed a stranger on the sidewalk after the bars let out.  Totally auspicious start to my senior year, right?
• October 28th-30th: Not only was this Halloween weekend, but it was also one of my best friends’ birthdays.  We went hard Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.  We’re talking shots everywhere, boys boys and more boys, texts like mad, drunken walks home.  All that, PLUS costumes.
• December 31st: Ok, confession time: I’ve really NEVER had a proper drunken New Year’s celebration, so I was motherfuckin determined this year to do it up right.  Well.  That backfired somewhat.  There was this boy…. God, how many sad, sad stories of fucked up nights begin like that??  Anyway, I had really counted on seeing him at a New Years’ party that night, but we ended up never making it because my roommate didn’t want to go to a party with a bunch of people she’d never met before.  We went to the bars instead, and come 1:30 in the morning, I was definitely that girl stumbling down stairs and crying.  It was raining, I was drunker and unhappier than I had wanted to be, and I ended the night by throwing every single thing on my bedside table across the room.  Happy 2011.
• January 8th: Ooooooh, but the next weekend I spent in Ann Arbor visiting a friend of a friend and I got the perfect amount of tipsy and just danced my ASS off at this club, and mannnn it was such a good night, I still daydream about it sometimes.
• February 12th: Really, all of February was one drunken, adventurous mess.  February was a great, rdiculous month.  But this night….this was probably one of the better drunken nights.  It was the formal for my job, which is not nearly as lame as it sounds.  It was basically an excuse for us all to get drunk together.  And did we ever.  There was pre-gaming and post-gaming at this guy’s apartment, Iwas coming off the rush of the weekend before, where many many happy events occurred, and I was surrounded on all sides by people who seemed intent on hitting on me.  Late February was kind of messy and things got weird around Spring Break, but this night my life was still just at that precipice, about to head into free-fall, but still at that okay point.  Looking back, it’s kind of a “If I knew then what I know now” kind of nights. 

And now…. here we are.  I thought about including my birthday night on the list, but it was really kind of lackluster this year.  I got drunk, don’t get me wrong, but one of my roommates had a friend in from out of town, my summer roommate stayed sober, I had been teary and sad earlier that day, I texted someone I should have not texted, etc.  It was a bit of a let-down.  BUT, I’ve got the rest of the school year ahead of me, as well as potennnnnnntially another summer spent here in BG (??) and then who the FUCK knows, so I really do believe the next 365 days hold a lot more crazy, adventurous, ridiculous, fun, drunken weekends, too, and i kind of can’t wait.

If At First You Don’t Choose Right, Choose Again

Ok, ok, ok.  Confession time.  I gotta be real witchu, internet.  I thiiiiiiink the reason I’m so upset today, yes, is that I’m super salty about the boy situations.  However, I got the chance to do some thinking over Spring Break, and I realized that I’ve largely been failing on my resolutions.  Yes, I did the reflecting I wanted, and yes, I made some moves to eat better and stay healthy.  I’ve been writing much more, and trying my hardest to be a better roommate, friend, and employee.  BUT, the places where I’ve been slacking are the places that needed the most work in the first place, the things that are hardest for me to do.  I haven’t been working very hard in school at all, because I’m having too much FUN.  I haven’t been reading more at work; I’ve been flirting more at work.  Jesus, girl.  And, until this evening, I hadn’t made things right with the people (or person, rather) that I needed to.  But I decided, in order to bump myself out of my grumpiness today, that I was going to message someone that things have been rocky with.  I figured there’s no time like the present to set things right, and it might help me feel a little less poopy about everything else.  Success fuels more success, right?  I didn’t tell anyone I was doing it (except the whole Internet, just now), and so now I’m sort of stuck in this private meltdown until I hear back from said person.  I mean, the message I sent was maybe a little crazy-brained and I sent it relatively unaltered, so much so that I actually gasped out loud when I pressed ‘send’, so it’s probably warranted, but.  I’m hoping it all pans out alright, but even if it doesn’t, I feel like it’s a step in the right direction.  Next?  More reading, less flirting.  Period.

5 More Places I Would Rather Be

• Summertime, around 1997 or so, between dinnertime and sunset, on the old stone grill on our back patio, reading Little House in the Ozarks, or exploring the backyard in my bare feet, desperately wishing I could stop the sun from moving further down in the sky.
• Spring break senior year of high school, laying out at the pool in my best friend’s aunt’s backyard, getting burnt to a crisp and listening to Cute Is What We Aim For on shared headphones.
• I was just doing a little Facebook creepin, and this guy I know had a profile picture of him walking a bike down a driveway, and everything around him was shady and leafy and damp and green and there were these AMAZING ferns to his left, and MAN, I just wanted to be able to smell the way the place in that picture smelled.
• March 2009.  I was so gloriously happy, blissfully unaware of all the twisty, turny, complicated places my life would visit starting in August.  I still remember the way the sun streamed through my window that spring, how happy I was to just walk around campus with my ipod, the late nights spent goofing around with people that changed the way I felt about this school.  Easy, uncomplicated, golden. 
• The summer after sophomore year of high school (2005?), in my best friend’s back yard, making our own slip n’ slide with a tarp and a hose, and drinking unsolidified Jell-o like it was Kool-Aid, turning our tongues blue.

I just realized that all of these are set in either spring or summer.  It’s snowing outside my window again some more right now, and I’m hungover, sick, and feeling pretty gloomy about sooooo many aspects of my life.  So I suppose what we’ve learned here is that I’ve got a fever and the only prescription is MORE SUNSHINE.

Numbers Game

• At this time one week ago, I was heading to the bars with my roommate, M.  That night ended at Corner Grill, and MAN, I just cannot express to you how much Corner Grill reminds me of last spring.  I fully plan on spending many more hours and dollars there before I graduate, because I just feel so fondly toward it.
• At this time last Friday, I was already in bed, 100% exhausted, and getting drunk-texted by roommate M.
• At this time on Saturday (technically Sunday? I’m not playing this whole “technically the next day” game all post, so just roll with it.) I was cozied up in a booth at The Pub, drinking with two of my oldest friends and various cohorts.  THAT night ended with my car getting puked in and a trip to the hospital.
• At this time on Tuesday night, I was watching Inception for the first time.  Mind.  Blown.  That night ended with Ican’ttellyou, a drive around BG, and cereal at 4 in the morning.
• At this time last night, I was gettnig drunk on vodka crans with my roommate, H., and our 31-year-old neighbor.  He hit on us and bought our drinks all night.  That night ended with karaoke at a dive bar and a rowdy, drunken photo shoot.  Also, my determination to not see four in the morning again for a WHILE was clearly weak sauce.
• At this time tonight, I’m in my bed in my underwear, doing some general internetting and texting, happily getting some much-needed me time.  This night will probably end with finishing (?) Emma, which I’ve been reading since Christmastime, and maybe some sexting?  Just kidding.  But really.  Am I serious?  Am I not?  THE WORLD MAY NEVER KNOW.

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.

The Not Even Remotely Dog Days Of Summer

Geeeeeez.  I promised myself I would have this up sometime in September.  And then, BAM, the last week of September really kicked my ass school-wise, and then it was a new month out of nowhere, so I was like, cool, no problem, I’ll at least get it posted earlier than last year’s.  And then ALL OF OCTOBER happened in what felt like about a week.  So, now it’s November, we’re three weeks away from Thanksgiving (!) and summer was three damn months ago. However, don’t let my tardiness with this post keep you from thinking that I’m not COMPLETELY psyched to write it.  Because this summer?  This summer kicked last summer’s ass. 

This summer was a terrifying propsect to me back in April.  I knew I would be staying in BG, spending my first summer away from Dayton ever, so this summer was kind of like freshman year in that I had no idea what to expect, and so was completely terrified to begin.  This summer, I arranged to stay in a humongous, gorgeous house with two (and late in the summer, three) girls I didn’t know very well, one of whom ended up becoming one of my closest friends.  Nowhere has ever become home to me faster than that house did this summer.  This summer got off to such a great start oh my god I don’t know if I can articulate it.  Coworkers everywhere, shotsshotsshots.  This summer started with tornado sirens, my oldest friend from home, and a kiss with a boy I really liked, whom I haven’t seen since (ehhhh, this isn’t true anymore after this past weekend, but it sounds so much more romantic this way, don’t you think?).  This summer started in a whirlwind of a night, lost keys, and a miserable all-day hangover.  This summer started lonely and shaky, and went nowhere but up, up, and away.  This summer was spent in bars, bars, and more bars.  This summer was Four Lokos and fountains and a ucked-up foot.  My time this summer was divided between BG and Dayton, as I spent nearly every weekend at home for some event or another.  This summer was up and down, up and down on I-75.  This summer was sundresses and parties on people’s side lawns.  I spent my days so lazily this summer, sleeping til noon, working at night, staying up and out late.  Lest you think all I did this summer was get wasted (which, ok, was a rather large part of my summer, but not ALL of it), pretty much all I did on my weeknights was wait for my roommate to get home from the RUBBER FACTORY where she worked so we could play cards and watch Whose Line?  Titillating stuff right there.  This summer was Grey’s Anatomy for hours on end, curled up on the futon that served as my bed, killing time before work.  In fact, I’d wager that a good majority of my time this summer could be described as “killing time before work”.  And work itself….was such a large part of me this summer.  It was the only responsibility I had, the only structure or definition that provided any shape to my days and weeks.  This past spring and summer really transformed the way I feel about that place, so that now it’s not a chore to go in at night; it’s almost enjoyable.  Although, to be fair, there were nights over the summer that I would come home so incredibly exhausted of working with the people I did.  This summer nerves were tried, that’s for goddamn sure.  This summer involved tiny baby kittens moving in to my house about halfway through, so this summer was cute and cuddly and sweet and troublesome.  This summer was also (man this is so hard to write) probably the last chunk of time I will ever work at Coldstone.  Oh man, that’s making me tear up.  I spent very little time thinking about my future this summer, and much more time thinking about my past.  This summer also contained what may or may not turn out to be an auspicious meeting; I’ve been holding my cards close to my chest on this one.  Hell, I’m nervous just throwing this out there, and I’ll probably come back here in three months and be like “….Idiot”.  This summer felt like it went by fast and slow all at once.  I was ready for people to be back in town, ready for another crazy great semester like spring had been, but was so busy just enjoying myself, the laziness and lack of responsibility, the drinking, that I never wanted summer to end.  Spending this summer up here really cemented my love of this place that I’ve ended up in, my love for this town, and my love for all the crazy twists and turns that have brought me right up to where I am now.  At the end of the summer, as I and one of my other summer roommates were spending a few days packing up and preparing to move out of our summer home, I wandered into her room to find her fast asleep on her stripped bed in the afternoon light, with a cat by her shoulder and a cat curled up in the crook of her legs.  It was one of the sweetest sights of my summer.  Moving out of the summer home was so, so hard; I was leaving the place that had made this unexpectedly one of the greatest summers on record into a new apartment with a roommate who would be gone all day for the final weeks of summer, leaving me lonesome and on rocky ground once again.  However, this summer really ended beautifully, at the bar where it began, conveniently enough, kissing another boy, and reuniting with people I love and had desperately missed all summer long.  This summer was quiet, soothing, sweet, lazy, crazy, adventurous, drunken, fun, and so overwhelmingly happy that I feel I’m bound to be disappointed by whatever comes next summer.  This summer taught me, though, not to let my expectations fool me, because above all else, the time I had this summer surprised the hell out of me by being unadulteratedly AWESOME.