brigdh

I started off, similarly to this year, having forgotten to send out Christmas Cards until it was too late. Everyone likes mid-January cards just as well! Really.

I watched the State of the Union address for the first time ever, and my (no longer current) roommate told me that she thought George W. Bush "is cute". I was so traumatized that I was unable to respond.

I started a recs journal (

brigdh) and updated all of two times. Go me.

My not-even-a-year-old, $100 CD-burner spontaneously exploded one night, taking my $60 CD-ROM for a class with it. Within a few months, my barely-two-years-old laptop followed it, dying a slow death by power port failure.

One night, a friend threatened suicide. This is the same friend who likely stole money from a student group he was the co-chair of, and subsequently abandoned. His boyfriend lived in my dorm. Friend's roommate, who is also my friend, and I decided to take the boyfriend to friends' apartment, about a mile away. Since it's around 2am on a weekend, I agreed to walk with boyfriend so he won't be alone (And how much does it amuse me that I am the one walking boys to safety? Nun of you muthafukas wanna mess wit' me, dat's all I'm sayin'). On the way there, we stopped to put out a couch fire on some drunk fraternity boys' porch, this being only a day after a different couch fire (likely arson) burned down a house on the same street and killed four people. I got home again at 6am, just in time to fall asleep and miss all my classes.

I wrote a paper of the the big subtextual Mercutio/Romeo love, as represented by different film versions of Romeo and Juliet.

I was recommended to apply for a Rhodes scholarship, but was unable to do so because of deadlines. It'll take me only three years to graduate; losing that extra year made it impossible for me to get some of the necessary materials before they were due.

In celebration of warmer weather, I fell asleep in the sun and got sunburnt so badly I couldn't walk right for the next few days.

I managed to garner a stalker, who I named Creepy Anthropology Guy, who liked to touch me. Thankfully, after that one quarter I haven't had to deal with him.

I wrote a twenty-page paper on the CrystalGamgee Wank, and got an A for the class. The same day, I wrote a paper on the skeletal evidence of tuberculous in the New World. I take diverse classes.

My family moved from the house we've lived in since before I could remember to some place out in the suburbs. It takes me a week to realize that I hate the suburbs, and the houses seem really weirdly far apart. I miss our old place. None of our neighbors get into screaming matches at 3am in their driveways here, no one breaks into our cars, and no one spray-paints 'bitch' on the speed limit sign across the street. How boring. Also, the public transportation out here runs only at 7am and 5pm, and no times in between. Considering that I don't drive, that made it pretty hard to go anywhere.

My cousin, on graduating from high school, won her class's "Strom Thurmond" award, which comes with a life-size cardboard cutout of Strom. Before realizing that it's a joke given by her government teacher to the most conservative student (with the "Ted Kennedy" award given to the most liberal), I managed to accidentally insult her several times and refer to Strom as a "hypocritical racist bastard". A few months later, after entering college, this same cousin told us that her major is "marrying a doctor". I proceeded to thank god that her parents (my godparents) never had the chance to raise me.

I did secretary work and filing in an office, and occasionally babysat various children.

fuda_100 opened, and I swore to write a drabble for every week. That lasted for a while.

I wrote Thy Faithfulness in Destruction, my first actual fic in at least seven months and probably much more than that. I was way proud.

People I considered my best friends stopped speaking to me, for reasons I still don't understand. After months of sliding deeper and deeper into a depression over it, they do something that effectively cuts off our last thread of communication. For some reason, this abruptly snaps me out of my black mood. I don't know. Emotions are weird.

I rode the tallest rollercoaster in the world. A bunch of times.

I got asked to write the Tsuzuki/Hisoka essay for

ship_manifesto, a fact which simultaneously made me incredibly proud and tremendously nervous. But it all worked out, well enough that I also got asked to write a Hisoka essay for

reflections_2.

I moved into a brand-new building, with a good friend as my roommate. We have the coolest dorm ever. There's even an actual bathtub, instead of just a shower! I cooked entirely for myself, and though I ended up usually making the same things every day, at least I didn't end up subsiding entirely on pizza and TV dinners like I feared.

I used a fake ID for the first time. The boy who took it studied it for a long time, enough to make me get nervous and start wondering about the policeman standing nearby, only to get the age on it wrong. I snapped, "it says eighty-three" and he waved me into the club.

My picture was on the front page of my university's newspaper, for participating in a "Guess the Straight Person" panel to help introduce freshmen to diversity.

I waited in line for an hour and a half to vote, only for it to ultimately not matter, as my state ended up going red. And yes, I know, every vote matters, etc, etc- but it's less encouraging to hear that when your state already has the most restrictive DOMA in the country and passes a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage anyway. What a wonderful experience for my first time voting in a presidential election.

I went to watch an old tradition here at my university, which happens every year on the Thursday before the football game against our big rival: crazy drunk people jumping into a lake in November in the middle of the night. My roommate and I made the mistake of standing too close to the edge, and got thrown in. That water was the coldest thing I have ever felt. Roommate lost her glasses and cellphone. The day of the game, I saw a life-size mannequin dressed in the rival's uniform, hanging from a noose out of a tree, being lynched. People here scare me.

I started a job at a candy store. There was indescribly annoying holiday music and hours and hours of wrapping, but there's also as much chocolate as I can eat. It all evens out. Then I develop a crush on a co-worker and regret it, because she could not be straighter if she tried.

I made a Tsuzuki soundtrack for

fst.

I wrote A Better Fate than Wisdom for

yaoi_challenge, a nice idea that could have used a deadline a week later. My

yuletide fic suffered much the same fate.

Overall, I suppose it was a fairly good year. There were things that could have been better, but hell, there were a lot of things that could have been worse, too. I spent most of it happy, or happy enough, which is the real measure of a year. I think I'm a different person than I was a year ago, and not neccessarily a better one, but it's hard to judge those things. You can't see yourself from the outside.

Who knows? I'm still alive, I had another 366 (leap year!) days of things and people and sun and rain and wind and stories and sleep and laughter, and I've got more to come. That's what matters.

What happened to

catesith18?