Here it is with less than 12 hours left in the year and I ran out of time to compose that post I wanted to. So instead of my usual SOC babble about all the valuable things that I’ve learned about myself this year (which, upon reflection, is a horrible idea for a post in the first place), here’s a brief, random, unordered list of highlights.

Favorite rediscovery: Music. All of it. It wasn’t until April or May that I realized I wasn’t listening to anything and hadn’t for months. Part of that was the broken iMac and lack of work commute so I wasn’t listening to my iPod. But I now find myself absolutely insatiable; I want to soak everything up.  I credit a lot of my breaking out of last winter’s depression to bands like The Fratellis and The Hidden Cameras

and of course The Wave Pictures … and Elvis Costello. And The Beatles. And Bob Mould. And The Decemberists (best show of 2008, by the way). And The Jam. And The Long Winters. And…you see what I’m saying.

Favorite purchase: my new couch. Oh, it’s comfy.

Most memorable event: Colleen and Gardiner’s Four-Day Wedding Extravaganza. I had a reading. I gave a toast. I found the priest for whom I would go Catholic. I met fantastic people. I headbanged. Most importantly, I became convinced that there will never be a wedding to top that one. It was, and I mean this without any sort of hyperbole, perfect.

Best website aside from the one I work on: Let Me Google That For You. Folks, I cannot tell you how much I love this site. I am in love with this site. I have yet to direct people to it, but have been able to cut a couple people down to size just by naming it.

“Where was that NYT article on whatevertheblah?”

“Here, LET ME GOOGLE THAT FOR YOU.”

Favorite new addiction: Twitter. I joined back in, when, June? after I realized that I was enjoying updating my Facebook status more than most consider normal. What started out as a 140-character challenge developed into something like a giant chat room in which incredibly silly and enjoyable conversations took place. Like this one, from September:

• me: reading an email and feeling like i’m being attacked by commas.
• kim: @smartgrrrl ,,, pew! pew! , , ,, ,, , pew! , ,,,
• me: @kpwerker I retaliate — – — blam! blam! — – — blam!
• me: working on configuring an EMP: 0))) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) ) )
• kim: Old skool: Arrows! -> –> -> -> –> —> –> -> ->
• me: en guard! ~~}=====>

More and more news sites and blogs are creating Twitter feeds, which means 2009 may see the death of Google Reader for me.

OK, maybe just a little bit of What I Learned About Myself This Year, because it’s significant for me and difficult to put into words — and when that happens I feel compelled to write it out: I keep wanting to write something like “I learned how to be patient/content/happy/awesome” but that’s not quite it. It is all those things, really, and I learned them in a sort of Zen way, where I just stopped  . . . worrying, I guess. Which isn’t entirely true. I still worry a lot, I still get a little obsessed with things that I can’t really control, and I still get tense. But I also trust that things will sort themselves out as long as I work towards that. I can handle the stress and the worry better now because I’m happier with where I’m at right now.

And that’s it, really — that’s the big deal, the big new shift in perspective, the big Thing That I Learned How To Do This Year: I learned how to be comfortable with myself. Almost completely comfortable. Comfortable with what I want and don’t want, comfortable in my own skin. Comfortable when I’m out with people, comfortable when I’m alone.

I wouldn’t say I know myself completely — I’m still likely to lie to myself in order to justify some impetuousness or other, and quite possibly in the near future, but this right here, at age 37, is the closest I’ve ever come to knowing what I’m all about as I’ve ever come before.

And I’m ready for whatever’s next.

No related posts.

On January 1, 2008, on the Blog That Was, I declared that the year would be the Year of Upgrades. The words no longer exist online but the plan came together, in some ways I did expect, and in others I couldn’t have possibly seen coming.

(My boss couldn’t believe that I’d just ax an old blog. “You deleted it?” I mean, I saved everything to file first. I’m not stupid. I have two degrees. Two and ¾, really, but I suppose “almost PhD” is like “almost pregnant” – you either are or you’re not. I’m not. Either of those things. Huzzah!)

In July, I traded in my 2005 iMac for a 2008 MacBook. This was done in compliance with the Law of Jobs, which mandates that all Apple purchases take place 1-3 months prior to the unveiling of a new edition of whatever product you buy. Even so, it wasn’t so much a “trade in” as it was a necessary thing — the iMac coughed through a kernel panic or two and I found out it had a bad logic board. How does a logic board go bad? I never asked. It wakes up one morning and decides if p, then cheese?

(and yes, I am aware that there are those reading who subscribe to the philosophy that all paths of logic lead to cheese. I’m open to this possibility, but I need to see the proofs.)

(then again, the Wensleydale I just snarfed down could be proof enough. Why did no one tell me before about this miraculous cheese?)

I was nervous about dropping the dollars on the MacBook, since I was also struggling with an incredibly unfulfilling job that paid a staggeringly unfulfilling salary. More than that, I could sense that the company was going under and I’d be without any salary or benefits at all, so I’d been looking and looking and looking for something else for months and months and months. The same week I learned I needed a new computer, I landed an interview for a web producer gig. And got the job. Snap, like that.

It’s strange now to look back on those couple of weeks and think that after all that time and effort, writing and rewriting resumes, reconfiguring my list of priorities so that I had a new bottom line every week, bargaining with myself about what I would and would not do, trying to figure out whether I wanted to find a job that would require writing or whether that would, as it had before, wear me down eventually, basically trying to determine what it is exactly that I want to be doing with myself until I finally decided that I didn’t have to have that figured out in order to get a job — after all that, all it took was knowing someone who worked in the office. Well, that and being awesome.

I consider myself extremely fortunate, particularly since this all happened before our government decided we’d been in a recession since last year. I’ve never taken much pleasure in the necessary evil of networking, but I’ve had to reverse my position on that since the summer. I also never thought I was much good at the self-promotion or the schmooziness, but again: I’ve had to rethink that over the last couple months.

2008 was about more than getting a job, though it was one of my goals for the year and it feels really good to be able to check it off the list. It was one of several major changes I went through this year and it’s only just now catching up with me — or rather, I’m only just now comfortable with the way these changes have altered my perspective on stuff: life, what I want, how to get it, etc. (you know: stuff.) More on that in the next post.

No related posts.

It’s been an interesting time in my head lately.

This morning I returned to my old standby, the Morning Pages, which I have been doing or the last six or so years, on and off. I don’t know why I leave off doing them, but I always do, and then I always come back to them, and the first page is always “Why do I stop writing the morning pages?” followed by, as it was this morning, a series of admonishments and punitive declarations about my lack of discipline and direction. (knock knock.)

But then I stopped. Not the writing, but the self-flagellation. Wondered (in writing) why it is that I think I have no discipline. How am I defining it? And I realized that by “discipline” I mean something very similar to mental boot camp, in which I repeatedly and forcefully beat myself up for not doing a good enough job at whatever it is I think I’m failing at (bang), threaten myself to do better or else (zoom), and make up a monumental list of commandments to follow henceforth (ka-pow!). I need to do X. I should make myself Z. If I don’t do Y, then I’m not really a D. And so on.

Setting myself up for failure, in other words.

(The previous sentence had a “more” in there but I took it out.)

I go through this every few months, it seems, and each time it’s like learning this one thing about me afresh. And there’s a part of me that’s all, “what is that about? why can’t you remember this one thing about yourself?” and, well, that would certainly illustrate my point, wouldn’t it.

But I think the reason I relearn this every few months is that it is an easy thing to forget, especially if I’m in a phase where I’m not being particularly productive — not a lot of writing or making things out of yarn.

This morning, writing it out, relearning it, sort of charged me up for the rest of the day. And not really in a good way. I felt on edge and staticky, as though anyone touching me would get the shock of a lifetime. The littlest things were setting me off, too.

“Is it ok if I…” “I WILL HAVE YOUR HEAD.”

It wasn’t until halfway through the day that I realized my mood was directly related to the writing I’d done. I stirred the pot and all the crap that had settled at the bottom was now bubbling at the surface.

As someone pointed out to me this afternoon, I’ve just been through two major life changes (“possibly three,” she said, in . . . awe? Let’s say “awe”), and that takes a while to process. And now just may be the time that things have settled, I have found the calm, and I can now take stock and start to move forward again.

So  . . . that’ll be interesting.

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