How’s 2015 working out for you so far? What are your hopes and plans for the year? Reflections? Resolutions? Better write them down while they’re still fresh and new: that squeaky-clean feeling fades fast.
Patience, Please
This site is under reconstruction and will look strange for a while. We regret the inconvenience.
2014, highlights, mainly chronologically: took my first-ever college class, went to New York, saw my first-ever broadway show, went off meds, visited colleges, cried a lot, hung out with tiny cousins, went back on meds, got a cat, got into college, read a lot of books, became a much more confident and experienced cook, went to a lot of museums, saw Hamlet, cried a lot, listened to a lot of songs by the Mountain Goats —
idk, it was a good/weird year. Here’s to 2015, though.
New Years:
-in parents’ absence, invited sort-of-girlfriend over
-tried to make creme brulee; results were atypical but tasty
-possibly kissed sort-of-girlfriend in the middle of the street at midnight
-realized 2015 is the year that we graduate high school and leave home; panicked
-built blanket fort to avoid life
-marathoned Lord of the Rings from within blanket fort
Happy 2015! I hope you have the time of your lives and that your year is weird and new and wonderful.
I approve of so many of your choices
Also I am glad we finally have a story from you where YOU kissed someone on purpose!
I am so glad you started the year off well!
At midnight, I:
-Thumbkissed my boyfriend from the Couple app we got since last year (you put your thumbs on your phone screens and when they are in the same place for a few seconds it vibrates. Last year we tried to video chat and my phone died before midnight…this was better)
-Stuffed a dozen grapes into my mouth
-Sat by the river with my parents and watched a great fireworks show over the clock tower
My city has an awesome tradition of having a big arts and entertainment festival downtown during the hours leading up to midnight. My parents and I watched dancers from a local studio, an Irish dance troupe with an Irish folk band playing, a magic show, and a hypnotist. We also made s’mores in the middle of a major street that was closed down. It was really fun and a great way to welcome the new year!
Long post is long. Here’s a confetti pie
On December 31st, 2013, I was staying with family in New Zealand, trying to recover from the last year. The group of teenagers invited me along with them to watch Monsters University while the adults consumed quite a lot of wine, and towards midnight we set off fireworks in the street. I was happy to see midnight arrive, because “I’m officially a college student!” I’d always felt sad about the old year ending, with the feeling I hadn’t done enough, but I expected 2014 to be better. Lo and behold, it actually was. It’s so true uni is orders of magnitude better than high school, but it’s also not what I expected at all. I didn’t have much of a plan or anything, it was just a case of “well, anything’s better than THAT”.
In 2014…
I listened to a lot of Lorde.
I got help for my mental health problems. They got even worse. It eventually worked.
I dragged myself to events and then freaked out about participating in conversations.
I tried things that didn’t work out. I tried things that did.
I formed a little posse of first-year maths nerds that went to way more lectures than is healthy.
I resolved to make “not having a terrible commute” a priority when I have a real job and am choosing where to live.
My other online community suddenly gave me opportunities to meet other Australians from it in person, and it was the best thing ever and the Dementors should be caking scared.
A guy who wasn’t really my type flirted with me, and it wasn’t nearly as satisfying as I expected it to be.
I went to an awesome CS party. The next day I went to my first ever nerd convention, alone, socialised with a geeky boy, and handed in my half-done assignment late. I still got an HD in the course.
I accidentally a MacBook.
I gave a real-life speech. People didn’t walk out I guess?
I went to College Parties, with drinking and dancing and hanging out with random strangers.
I acquired enough knowledge to have a constant sense of “ARG I KNOW NOTHING”.
I acted in a sketch show which people came to and laughed at. I can still feel the fake blood.
For seven weeks, I handed everything in on time.
I dressed up as Cosima for a CS party, and handed in my assignment more than a day late.
I devised a system for transferring theorems to my brain with efficient use of sanity points and coffee.
I started writing a crackfic and accidentally a plot.
I went to a physics conference, populated mainly by honours students, because part of my brain likes trolling the rest. Then I met the high school student.
Whatever all that stuff that happened with my high school friends was.
I acquired a taste for dystopian SF.
I’ve been thinking through my resolutions, since I learned to be strategic and like it this year, and have listed things like:
Read all those nonfiction books
Consistently spend time with friends
Keep getting healthier
Do cool creative stuff
(Partitioned into useful subgoals of the sort I’m actually motivated to do.)
“I accidentally a MacBook”
…
I spent New Year’s Eve alone on the internet (though one is never truly alone on the internet). I woke up late and groggy that morning and went on to have a long and exhausting conversation with my parents about my academic plans and mental health problems, one in which they both tried to be individually supportive but my mother couldn’t resist using my issues as a bludgeon in her ongoing issues with my father.
Then I baked cookies and went to dinner with friends — in which we talked a lot about literature and the different ways our different universities approach its study — and we played Pathfinder for the rest of the evening, making puns, most of which I’m not allowed to reprint here.
It was a mix of good and bad, like the year promises to be. I didn’t make any resolutions. I don’t know what my life on the first day of 2016 will be like except that hopefully it would be a surprise to me on the first day of 2015.
Cookies, literature, friends, puns — sounds like a perfect evening to me.
The morning was unconscious and the afternoon unpleasant, but the evening was indeed very near perfect.
Kokonilly and Kai, last thread – pretty much! My actual mother wasn’t in a great position to raise a child at the time, so I was raised by her parents. She and her sister had moved out by then, so I was kind of an only child, but also my effective parents had raised two other kids before me so in some ways I was like a youngest child, and I have younger half-siblings…
A question for you Re: Australia and New Zealand. Does Winter break happen at an arbitrary time there? Here it happens around Christmas and New Year’s, but there is no July Holiday. Do different schools have different breaks?
Arg, that was supposed to be on the random thread. Anyway…
Yep, it does. Schools have a two-week break in early-mid-July, at a fairly arbitrary time set by the state they’re in (even Queensland, and Queensland is weird). Year 11 and 12 got three extra weeks before that at my school, although some 11/12 colleges have a trimester system. At uni we’re still guaranteed two weeks around that time after exams, but it varies quite a bit. As do summer breaks, but that sounds similar to yours.