2014 And Other Years: A Retrospective That Turned Out To Be Longer Than I Expected

There are less than 24 hours left in 2014, and I can't say that I'm sad to see it go. Typically when the end of the year is imminent, I sit and reflect on everything that happened throughout its course. Usually this process is touched with some bit of melancholy just due to the nature of my personality (my unwillingness to move forward and my general hatred of change), but really the only loss I have to mourn over the passing of this year is the fact that I watched 365 separate dates go by that will never come again. That's it.

I don't think I could be more excited about 2015. I don't know if I could be less excited either, unless I was saying goodbye to a truly fantastic and life changing year (see: 2011), but again when it comes to a new year, all we're really looking at is another cycle of days and nights with distinctive numbers attached to separate them from all the others. It's only as special as we make it.

I'm not even really sure how to proceed. It's not like 2014 was an utterly terrible year that I'd like to scrub from my memory. I guess it's just that there were very few highlights. Off the top of my head, I can only think of one thing that truly stands out as great, and that was Summer Jam. That was far and away the best day of the entire year, and I'm extremely grateful to be able to be a part of it. As a matter of fact, that was probably one of the highlights of my entire life, as I got to check off quite a few bucket list items that day. If some kind of cosmic wizard told me that I had to live one day of my life for the rest of eternity and that day would never end, but I could choose whichever day I wanted, that would be a top contender.

So there's one shining beacon amidst a whole year of meh. And again, it's not like there were a great number of tragedies that befell me this year either. My dad was diagnosed with cancer, so that's been a bit of a trial, but he seems to be beating it, so that's also something to be thankful for. It's just that when I look back, that diagnosis (and its ensuing consequences) and Summer Jam are the only two things that seemed to have any real impact on my memory of the year. Otherwise it was just a tranquil lake of mediocrity that occasionally lapped on the shores of disappointment. 

I suppose the most interesting thing to do would be compare 2014 to each of the rest of the last five years of my life, since those are the years since I entered the "real world."

2009 was a cataclysmic year in my personal timeline. The first half of the year was fantastic, and contained what may have been my favorite semester of my college career. It introduced me to Magic, which may seem trivial, but that game actually helped shape my life over the course of the next year and a half or so, so it's nothing to scoff at. Over the summer I was forced by financial limitations to drop out of grad school. On one hand that was fine, because I hated grad school, but on the other hand, it was terrifying for a number of reasons. For one thing, I had to commit myself to the "real world." For another thing, it meant my days of hanging out on campus with my friends were over, and to me that was the most distressing aspect, particularly because it came so abruptly. It seems silly, but it hit me hard, and I didn't know what to do with myself. I didn't have any friends at home, and I didn't have any job prospects lined up. So I did what I could to make some money and took a job as a janitor. By the time the year was over, I was on okay footing, plodding along through life, even if doing so with no real purpose. So while 2009 was sort of a roller coaster, for that very reason it was pretty spectacular, and the ups and downs gave me something to remember it by.

2010 began with little fanfare. I did my thing as a janitor for a couple months, and that was that. Then my brother decided to introduce Magic to his group of friends, who up until that point I considered to be insufferable dorks. I had no real desire to ever hang out with them... but if they were gonna play Magic, that was a different story. I desperately needed someone to play with. They played, I had a good time, one thing led to another and I realized they weren't actually as insufferable as I thought on first impression, and suddenly I had friends again. Moreover, I'll always remember that summer as the only time I've ever really reached that zen state of mind where I was completely content with my life and social circles; or in other words, the only time I've ever been single and totally fine with it. I didn't need a girlfriend and I didn't want a girlfriend. I had a good group of friends with which to play Magic till the wee hours of the morning every night after work, and that was all I could ask for.

I wanna keep this as abridged as possible, but that all changed when I met a girl, I was kinda into her, we hung out for a bit, I realized I wasn't as into her as I initially thought, and I broke it off. I wanted to end that year with as little to do with her as possible, but that wasn't really in the cards considering she was part of a new group of friends that formed on RPI's campus. I still don't know exactly how all that went down, but at the end of 2010, which was again an overall solid if somewhat unremarkable year, the stage was set for an unprecedented turn of events.

2011. Man. This year deserves so much attention I'd probably have to split it up into multiple blog posts. I can easily say it was the defining year of my life, but because there were so many intricate details and complex series of events, I'll keep it to bullet points.

-I moved out of home

-I got a girlfriend for the first time in my life

-I got a second job, quit my job as a janitor, and got another nighttime job as part of a planned transition to a more responsible adult life

-I got my dream job

It was a freaking whirlwind. Everything happened so fast and so unexpectedly that even now it's hard to believe some of it really happened. As I mentioned before, 2011 was one of those years I was actually sad to see go. I don't think it's a stretch to say it was the best year of my life.

2012, by contrast, was actually one of the worst years in recent memory. It started off great, like an extension of 2011. January 2012 is another one of those times in my life that I can look at and say "you know, I was really content then." And of course that's always when the rug is pulled right out from under you. At the end of January, we moved out of Troy, and not long after that my girlfriend and I broke up. It wasn't a bad breakup; honestly it wasn't much of a breakup at all. We still lived together and did all the typical couple-y things, so it was like dating without the stress or responsibility of the title, and honestly that was pretty great. But then she met a new guy, and that's when things got messy. To make a long story short, she ran off with him, and that was when the classic bad breakup stuff happened. I don't want to get into it too much right now, but I will say there is no one on the planet I have more disdain and less respect for than the guy she left with. Anyway, I spent the last couple months of the year dealing with the fallout from that, and it was rough, as breakups are.

2013, however, brought with it a ray of hope. I met a girl very early on in the year (actually at the tail end of 2012, but we didn't start talking until 2013), and I knew she would be the one to help me get over my ex once and for all. I had never met a girl like her before, she was pretty much everything I was looking for. I even went so far as to say I was going to marry her, which is something I've never said before or since. Spoiler alert: I didn't. Surprise surprise, I was wrong about a girl. In any case, there wasn't any real emotional baggage attached to that one since it didn't get far enough off the ground to warrant that, so it was just another set of stories for Dr. Love to mine a little bit of wisdom from. The other big thing about 2013 was that it was the year I finally bought a car. I also got my own health insurance (which I was supposed to have as soon as I started work full time in 2011 but I had never filled out the right paperwork), but having a car was so huge. I could finally go wherever I wanted whenever I wanted without having to bother someone for a ride or to borrow their car. On top of that, 2013 was the year I was introduced to League of Legends, and that's been another defining aspect of my life ever since. Overall, 2013 was a pretty solid year.

And that brings us up to speed. To recap, 2009 and 2012 were years that were both great and terrible (though 2012 more terrible than great), 2013 was more-or-less positive, and 2010 was pretty middle-of-the-road. I guess the year that has the most in common out of all of those with 2014 was 2010. So in that sense, if I'm setting myself up for 2011: The Sequel... then I guess I'm okay with that.

In any event, peace be with you, 2014. You gave me virtually nothing worth missing, and I suppose that's for the best. I miss enough things from my lifetime as is.

I Am Still Here

I think I'm the only one left, and that's okay. I really should do this more often, though. I've only written three other posts the entire year, and the year will be over in less than a month.

I have so many things on my mind; so many things to say, but now is not the time for any of them in particular. The best time to say them is when they're formulated clearly and cohesively. Of course, it so happens that whenever that time comes, I'm at work and will be for the next 7 hours or so. And by the time I leave, all motivation to sit down and wax philosophical on the ole blog machine has departed, replaced by a desire to just plop myself down at my computer and get in a few hours of League with my internet friends before we all go back to reality for the night.

I guess that could be what I'm doing wrong in the first place. Maybe instead of waiting for a particular jolt of inspiration, I need to just sit down and go with the flow of whatever it is that springs to mind. Yes yes, I know this blog is a veritable sinkhole of metaphysical "maybes," and I realize that I've addressed this very topic on more than one occasion before. But there's certainly some merit to it. I have these grandiose concepts that I can never bring myself to commit to internet space because I'm concerned I don't have the correct lead-up or the proper closing paragraph. I'm afraid that whatever I write will, in the end, have no impact on the reader because it wasn't packaged properly.

Ah, but that's it, isn't it? There ARE no readers anymore!

It's just me. Sitting here plunking away purely for my own benefit. But I am still here. And as long as I am, I might as well make it worth my own time and at least put down the fragments of thoughts and the concepts that I have when they do strike, so that they don't become forgotten and go totally to waste.

Heck, I've just written more than I imagined I could write about really nothing at all. I wrote three paragraphs on not writing. Although there's more to my lack of posting than just a simple inability to properly organize my thoughts. Part of it has to do with the fact that, for me, these blog posts are a form of catharsis. Typically I review and assess my own issues by way of strange pieces of symbolism that I hope can be translated into something meaningful and relevant to whoever might stumble across this blog (which, again, at this point is most likely no one). The hangup I have is my fear that, once I address a particular issue, if simply posting about it on the blog wasn't enough to beget substantial relief, then I won't know how to deal with it henceforth. So rather than face that potential problem head on, I just kind of put it off. It's the kind of thing where, say, you like a girl and want to ask her out, but you're afraid she'll say no, so rather than risk failure, you just avoid her entirely. That way the possibility of her saying yes can always exist in your mind.

That's honestly a terrible way to go about your life, but I usually let it get the better of me, due in large part to my underlying existential dread of not having a goal to accomplish or anything to look forward to. So for example, if I have an idea for a blog post, I have two options: I can post it and end up with something concrete to look back on which may not have perfectly captured my abstract thoughts on the subject; OR I can just keep putting it off and keep the possibility of that perfect post alive forever.

So that's where we're at right now. So much to say, but the mostly self-imposed inability to actually say it. Although I must admit, it does feel good to have the fingers navigating the landscape of the laptop keyboard at this pace again. I should probably get back on the bloggery train. It might help me sort some things out. Goodness knows there are quite a few things I need to sort out.

But for now I just stopped by to update my tagline and my picture. The old ones were outdated. And because I know Future Bill, when he reads this, will want to know what they were (his memory not being what it used to be), the tagline said "Bring us the girl and wipe away the debt" and the picture was the icon for Fiddlesticks' fear. They made sense at the time, which was back in May. Oh and I guess last time I posted I also noted what the previous tagline and picture were. Neat. I'm such a good historian.