This is the first time I’ve been homesick, really heartachingly homesick, for BG in a while.  Maybe it’s because I know I’m going to be there this weekend and I just want all the wonderful things that are going to happen to be happening now.  I’m not sure.  All I know is, I went to check the weather there for the next few days and caught a glimpse of the map, just that one corner of the tri-state area, and lost it.

My apartment appears to be sabotaging itself this week, I have to be up in seven hours to walk a half hour in the freeezing cold, money is weighing on my mind once again.  My solution to dealing with adversity is to regress, and right now, it would be lovely to just rewind one year.  To be in a different bed, in a different room, in a different town, a different candle burning and different book on my bedside table.  To have a different tomorrow to live.

In other news, my parents came down yesterday to bring me my new TV (!!!) and various other items I forgot when I came back, which was delightful because my mom swooped in and cleaned all my dirty dishes, insisted on buying me lunch, and then took me shopping for cleaning supplies, since she was simply appalled at my lack thereof.  So basically, I have an AWESOME new TV, clean new cutting boards, a shiny tub, cute new pink sponges, and an all-around comfier home.

In other other news, I think the only reason I don’t own The Notebook for my very own yet is that it’s basically shown on Oxygen literally every other weekend.  Bliss.

So I think I’ll start a new feature, “Today’s Little Thing”, and today, it’s my new bath handles, replacing the old ones which barely functioned anymore (and are paid for by my landlord!).  Such a little thing, but it’s given me soooooo much contentment.

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?

Another great thing about being home is that I get to see my niece SO MUCH.  Like, every day for the past week, I think?  I’m going to have withdrawals when I head back to school.  I’ve never been one for babysitting or being around infants, so it’s pretty astounding to me how much I love her and want to hang out with her, and miss her when I don’t see her; sometimes, a few hours after she leaves, I’ll already be lonesome for her.   And, watching her grow and learn new things, even just since I’ve been in town, is one of the coolest things I’ve ever experienced.  She has huge cheeks, fingers I love to munch on, and the loudest baby yells EVER.  Ugh, I love her so much, you guyssssss!

Nevertheless, I was daydreaming in the shower about how I wish there were a way to scoop up my whole apartment in my arms when I get back and hug it.

I miss how pretty it looks inside with my white, blank walls when it’s light outside.  I miss my giant comfy couch and my big grey circle chair and my bed.  I miss feeling like a grownup living and making it on her own, feeling independent.  I miss controlling the remote.  I miss never having to wear pants and sometimes not wearing a shirt, either.  I miss the other people in my program, because now I’m never around people my own age except for the very occasional old friend catch-up visit, and it’s not enough.  I miss my kooky upstairs neighbor (who read me my TAROT before I left!  Twice!).  Sometimes, I just miss living alone.  I can’t believe those words just came out of my fingers, but my time was my time and my space was my space.    I miss the routine I had settled into.  I miss walking to classes.  I miss my classes.  I miss learning and loving the path I suddenly found myself on.  I miss feeling like I was doing something new every single day.  I miss the one part in my apartment where I could stand and see almost all of my earthly possessions with just the sweep of my head.  I miss my cozy nights in, even though I’m essentially doing a lot of the same thing here.  It just felt different there.  I miss singing really loudly all around my apartment.  I kind of even miss the town.  I miss going to campus.  I miss having my stuff around me.  Ugh, I just miss the life I started there and then abruptly had to abandon.

And, because fair is fair, and there are advantages to being home:

I do not miss my stupid front door in which the key always sticks, every. single. time.  I don’t miss my scary, shitty, outdated laundry facilities or doing laundry myself, period.  I do not miss very rarely getting a square meal.  I don’t miss (except I kind of do) eating crap so, so often because I can’t cook and can’t be arsed to learn how (haha, British slang, where did you come from??).  I don’t miss having to spend money on groceries, or bleeding money in general.  I do not miss listening to my upstairs neighbor’s cat run across her floors every night.  I don’t miss having no/very little leisure reading time.  I don’t miss the smelly front hall of my building, or my cobwebby mailbox, or taking out the trash.  I do not miss having a few days where I had literally no real-life human interaction.  I do not miss getting lonely.

There was a time in my life when I absolutely could not fathom ever wanting to NOT be at my childhood home.  I couldn’t imagine growing up and being OK with being away from it all the time.  So even though I’m here now and missing my Athens apartment dearly, I take the missing as a good sign, a growing-up sign.  There are way too many moments in my life which make me feel painfully young, much younger than I am, so I’ll try to take this feeling and spin it into a positive.

I’ve always been a big reader, from the time my older sister sat me down between her bookcase and trash can and wouldn’t let me move until I had mastered Hop on Pop.  I looooooooved the local library as a little girl; hell, I still kind of do, although I don’t spend very much time in Dayton anymore.  From the Betsy-Tacy series, my one true and unimpeachable love which will last until the day I die, seriously, to the All-Of-A-Kind Family*, from the Mennyms (oooooh, which I haven’t read since I was about 8 or 9, I wonder if they’re still just as magical?) to the Rose Wilder books, I was always, always reading.  This habit continued through grade school and junior high, as I discovered the His Dark Materials trilogy, Agatha Christie mysteries, and, of course, Harry Potter.  Unfortunately, my passion fell off a little when I entered high school, and mandatory novel reading became par for the course in my Honors-track English courses.  I hate, hate, HATE being rushed through a good book, and although I’ve always been an avid reader, I’m also a slow one.  The pace of the courses was just too fast for me to get really involved with the books, so even though I discovered a bunch of great writing which I still love to this day (Jane Eyre, A Tale Of Two Cities, Crime And Punishment, Shakespeare, etc.), a lot of the time I was frustrated or stressed while reading them.  I also didn’t get a lot of leisure reading in, which I sorely missed, even through college.

As you may have picked up from reading pretty much anything I’ve written in the past few years here, I was an English major in college.  My decision to become an English major at the time felt like such a decadence to me.  I was already majoring in Psych, but upon discovering that I could seriously finish that major within, like, two and a half years, I talked it over with my advisor and decided, ahhhh, what the hell, let’s add English, too, shall we?  Best.  Decision.  Of my LIFE.  From the introductory course I took my first semester to the high-level, theory-driven courses I ended up taking junior and senior years (plus one Shakespeare one I conned my way into freshman year, which was pants-shittingly terrifying for someone who was surrounded by seniors, knew less than nothing about literary theory, and had only read about three of his plays, but ended up being simultaneously awesome, as well), I loved it all.  Even the shit-tastic Contemporary Fiction course I took one spring (although that was mainly because there was this way cute, very articulate adn intelligent-seeming Graphic Design major in that class).  I just had this overwhelming urge to learn and to know as much as possible, because capital-L Literature captivated me.  Still does.  I wanted to understand the theories and memorize the time periods and who fit where and what their major works were and basically just read everything.  I was introduced to John Donne, William Faulkner, Evelyn Waugh, a new and begrudging appreciation for Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Virginia Woolf, Kate Chopin, TS Eliot, and my new literary boyfriend, Henry James.  Even amidst all this literary love, there were some real shitstorms in there, like the freakin’ Brit Lit pre-1600 class that was all Chaucer and Beowulf and basically a recipe for boredom, or the two WD Howells novels I was supposed to read senior year, but seriously, some dude’s paint business is just not interesting to me, I’ll pass.  Also, I was assigned to read Sister Carrie twice, once as a freshman and once as a senior, and finished it zero times.  I’m still bound and determined with that one though, and one day, I’ll make it through.  All this is a really long-winded way of saying that college ignited the thirst for literary knowledge in me that had always been simmering just under the surface, and it hasn’t really let up.  Since I was focused so much on, you know, being an English major, there wasn’t much time for reading for pleasure.  I was too busy trying to force my way through Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man to have time for, like, Jeffery Eugenides or Jonathan Franzen.  Summers became prime pleasure-reading time for me, although I spent them mainly with light and easy mysteries.

However, at the beginning of the year, a roommate and I both dedicated ourselves to reading more of what we wanted, if only for fifteen minutes at the end of the day, mostly to help keep our sanity intact through second semester.  I was so happy!  I read an Irene Nemirovsky work, Emma, and started The Age of Innocence.  I’m not sure what happened, but around March, the habit fell away, and though I tried to re-ignite it with Anna Karenina in June, uhhhhh, June is maybe not the best time to start a lengthy, dark Russian drama, and I failed.  The only thing I’ve really read since July is Betsy and the Great World for maybe the fifteenth time.  So I’ve decided to re-(re-, re-, re-)dedicate myself to pleasure reading.  I know it might seem like, heyyyyy mayyyyyyybe since you never stick with it, it’s not the best hobby for you!  But it is!  I promise, it makes me so, so happy, I just tend to let myself get caught up in other things and let my novel-reading slide, and then I return to that novel like six weeks later and am like “Wait, wait, wait.  WHO is Ellen Olenska related to again?”  But it’s something that is so incredibly relaxing and allows me to unwind after long grad-school days, and fills the literary void in my life now that all I’m doing is learning about counseling.  So I’ve re-picked up The Age Of Innocence and am just tearing through it and have no idea why I put it down in the first place, and I have a six-week break ahead of me and can’t stop squealing about all the good reading I’m going to do.  I’m on a huge late nineteenth/early twentieth century kick, hence most of my authors I’m looking up currently, and I CANNOT wait to start crossing things off of my book list.  PLUS, the time is ripe to start forming my New Year’s Resolutions, and one of them will undoubtedly revolve around reading more in 2012.  I’m so happy, so excited, and so, so, SO ready to read.

*Hoooooly shit, I just looked this series up on Amazon, and the “Customers who bought this also bought” suggestions offered up both Blue Willow, which fascinated me as a young girl and which I had totally forgotten about, and CADDIE MOTHERFUCKIN’ WOODLAWN, which I loved so so so so SO MUCH when I was little and once read in a single afternoon.  Oh my.  Be still, my beating heart.

I suppose I should recognize, too, that it isn’t all bad.  My weekends have actually been somewhat busy for the last month, with family and friend visits and trips home and to BG, so it was nice to have a lazy weekend with absolutely nothing to do but a few school things.  Also, I called home tonight when my family was finishing up dinner, and my sister’s family was there, plus another sister, plus two dogs, and my mom, dad, and a third sister who are always there, and there was chaos and laughter and I could hear everyone talking to everyone else, and it gave me heart pangs a little, but it made me much more excited for being home for a month.  Thus far I had just been looking around my apartment going “I don’t want to leeeeeeeave you!”, but hearing what’s waiting for me on the other end of the phone line did me some good.  And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to grab a few beers and my novel and take a BATH, which I haven’t done since I don’t even know when, and it’s going to be exquisite.