2009, right?

This year was really great. It really was. 

I mean it. 

It was hard and it kind of kicked my ass as I believe I have stated here before but among the mess of growing pains and things I complained about and stupid, difficult lessons I had to learn (all of them in some way because of things I screwed up or didn't care to prioritize or procrastinated about, really) so many great things happened to me. So many wonderful people literally entered my life as some of my dearest friends, and others stayed, they stayed like they always stay regardless for some reason beyond my comprehension and for this reason alone I should not be allowed to complain. 

I don't know what has happened to me to deserve it, but there is one thing I can say for sure about my life. And that is that although I may joke about being a freak magnet and how strangers come up to me out of the blue in places like public restrooms and malls and tell me personal information including their most disturbing problems, that I also concurrently have attracted some of the best people I know exist in this world to be my friends. 

(I'm an unequivocal fan of my family so I should note that they are never excluded and never far from my heart or mind. And this year was mostly great and especially meaningful with them, too.) 

I started off my year losing my grandma and I wrap up this year heavy with that knowledge still although it's processing better these days. And I am learning to use her as a catalyst and a guide as I believe she would appreciate, although I still think mortality sucks and we all got a raw deal but there is nothing I can do about that. No wonder everyone loves this Twilight train wreck. It's like global death anxiety permeated the pop culture. 

I also went back to work full-time after finishing my graduate degree and that was a really difficult transition, I admit. I was tired, really, fundamentally, after 15 months of such crazy concentrated newsgathering work and a crushingly disappointing news bureau experience that was so stupid it almost defied description. I was bummed out about my weight and nervous that I couldn't do anything about it due to some bizarre combination of my body's stubborness where that is concerned, my relative dislike of exercise and my infinite love for wine and cheese and things that make you go mmmmmmmm in general. 

I began to deal with that and in some stroke of luck won an insane Biggest Loser contest at my workplace. The mood police were on duty and along with the effort to exercise almost daily and eat better I lost 20 pounds and actually felt really great by the time May rolled around. 

Summer rocked. Summer was fantastic. I was in a naturally fabulous mood for the first time, I shit you not, since my ex-boyfriend left in the winter of 2005. 

Four years. Four years of maintaining, of tolerating my daily life, punctuated with occasional minor happiness. Suck. 

Anyway, I was so grateful that I remembered how to be happy this summer without effort. I couldn't really believe it was happening but it did and I feel very, very grateful that although since then I've hit upon some darker times again that it happened. I know it's in there. I am inspired to keep working and striving towards it, even though that just means living my daily life in the best way I know how. I know I have the capacity for joy. 

(If you don't understand this part it's okay. Just know it's in no way as self-indulgent as it can sound. It's really, really tricky.)

BlogHer in lots of ways made my summer and my year, and not just because Chicago is one of my favorite places in the country and it was invigorating to get a tattoo there. It was a profound experience for me this year. It's difficult to explain it, and that may be why I never wrote a recap post, but it's like a three-day festival of everything good about my corner of the Internet. So maybe it's my Blog Woodstock, or three-day Lollapalooza (I am incapable of speaking in terms other than outdated music festivals, apparently.) 

It is this community that has built up around me in the past five years live and in person. It is wine and words and pictures. It is a ridiculously good time and I'm sure that for a lot of people who have not embraced the particular world of blogging that I do it would make absolutely no sense whatsoever, but that's okay. I wouldn't get what those people do either, maybe. I don't care about skeet shooting or Bunco or any number of other things that are probably pretty cool if you yourself do them, this just happens to be what I do. You know, over there, in that hotel lobby with some fucking awesome women who happen to think it's totally fine to take pictures of ourselves reflected in salt shakers. 

Anyway, I've more or less integrated the people and experiences that mattered to me from this summer's experience into my daily life so it's not such a shocker.I could easily call them out. Karen makes me feel beautiful. Laurie put me in her phone in the lobby and brought me down a barrette the next day because I said I wanted to learn how to fix them in my hair and beyond that is a genius who became someone I could visit at the beach the very next week and at her house months later. Sarah reflects me back to myself in the most peculiar way and makes me believe in best friends like when I was 15 but without the crazy, and also may have to bring me beer in the nursing home. Suebob and Maria make me wish I lived in California. Melissa is illuminated and makes me want to be a better writer. Suzanne and Heather astound me with how much I am inspired when I'm near them. It is infinite, really, and I think we are all so lucky we have it. I believe so much in the ultimate goals of that Web site and this community. I will always be so glad I've had the opportunity to be a part of it. 

By the way? Genie is the best (and also MY) BlogHer roommate who also became a mom this year and I am so happy for her and her little family. This post made me cry, because it is one of the nicest things anyone has ever written about me, ever. It is also one of the most scarily accurate summations of my personality - the darker side of it with the light of understanding and compassion shed upon it, mind you - that I have ever read and this is another freaking example of why I'm so lucky. SO LUCKY.

(This is my year-end recap and is therefore by its very nature allowed to be narcissistic. I'm calling it. ;))

There is such power in relationships. I may not have gotten the boy in 2009 that I really think I want, I may never get him, and in some ways, eh. Maybe I'm the reconstituted Virgin of Guadalupe or some shit like that. But dammit, I have FRIENDS. Offline ones, too. They are not written about so much, they are not often seen here, but they are real and they are so loved and appreciated. They tolerate my iPhone addiction and tell me they love me and know my story as writ on walls in hieroglyphics back when we used those, you see. 

I spiraled out in the fall and the bad times hit again. The living situation was a little weird and work was hard. I struggled with what my next step should be and creative inspiration was limited. 

But I kept writing. I kept shooting. I kept at it, although I didn't know why, and that's probably what should be my epitaph. 

She kept at it although she didn't know why. 

This year I took a long trip to California to watch my sister celebrate her master's degree. We had a really meaningful family vacation in August, and reconvened on the same beach in November to celebrate Thanksgiving and my uncle's birthday. 

I spent some time late in the year with one of my oldest and dearest friends, someone who in spite of miles and distance and such different lives will always be one of my touchstones, who taught me in the weeks after that visit that we never, ever know what effect we're having in the moment. We just have to do and say the best things we can. We have to be honest to the best of our ability with the people who mean the most to us, the people we'd save from fire and flood if we could. We have to trust them to make the best decisions and to be able to hear what we're saying when it is based in deep love and concern. 

I had some great meals this year and some disasters. The best in restaurants were a Cioppino at Sogno DiVino in San Diego's Little Italy that I would have shipped to me frozen without question and a shrimp burger and beer at Fannie's on Tybee Island, Georgia, that combined with an ocean view made my trip and made me believe once again in the restorative power of coastal American food. I ate more sushi and edamama this year than I have consumed in my entire life thus far. I still didn't have my own kitchen yet, so I didn't cook a whole lot myself. That's on my list. 

I drank a lot of wine (mostly Spanish and South American, red) and some reasonably good beer. I hated the Pittsburgh Penguins and lost my mind when they knocked the Caps out of the playoffs, but this season I had a fantastic seat at a game because Sarah and her father-in-law are nice. I still believed in Terrapin basketball and the Washington Mystics. I saw Green Day live and it changed my life. 

I wore MAC #3 perfume and green eyeliner almost every day. Green and orange are still my favorite colors. I still miss having a dog, also daily. I spent ridiculous amounts of money on my paid-off car. I got an iPhone in March in Austin and it is perhaps my most favorite material possession ever, second only to the pink Sony boombox that saw me through the late 80s and many, many dubbed tapes from the radio. 

Michael Jackson's death knocked me sideways. 

I stood in freezing Washington, D.C. at the Inauguration concert and felt an energy that I have never felt before in a city I've lived I've lived beside my whole life. I watched on my television the next morning as the first African-American president, a person I still believe to be a true agent of change, took the oath of office. 

I went to Charlotte twice and Austin for SXSWi and the aforementioned Chicago and San Diego and Pittsburgh and to New Orleans for my most awesome first Mardi Gras. I finally sat on and broke my beautiful green glasses so I have to get another set of frames. I spent a stupid amount of time searching for my chargers for my seemingly endless array of electronic devices. I made three apple pies. I finished NaBloPoMo.

I didn't welcome Christmas. I wasn't ready and to be honest I didn't really care. It came anyway. 

It is January now. The last month of 2009 was punctuated with me entering this photography contest and being so blown away by the nice things people were saying about my entry that I felt that whether I won or lost I had already accomplished something. And then another friend called and asked me to enter this other cool contest for people of the blog sort and these two things combined have served to make me ready to make a life change that has been simmering for a long time. Like a decade. 

I think it involves Virginia and I am seriously freaking out. 

Speaking of the aughts, I think I might do some sort of wrap-up posts this weekend because this was a DECADE here, people, and for me it was the most profound one yet. I'm coming up on an anniversary next week that started out a very happy one and ended up sending me into my own personal bell jar for most of the aughts. It is fundamentally why this blog exists and why I am currently inarticulately telling you about my year. I'm going to write the shit out of something about it because you know what, I can. 

Happy new year. 

And I'll tell you one thing - and you can write this down, as we are wont to say in my family: 

Next January 1, 2011? If I'm not dead, I'll have just turned 40. I'll be writing some crazy wrap-up from Pittsburgh if the Caps play up there in the Winter Classic because Kim and I have a tenuous date for it already. 

And also? Next January? I think I'll have some kickass things to share. Really. Because I'm finally allowing myself to expect a lot from a year, whether I'm ultimately disappointed or not. I'm not staying home so I have to go big. 

Comments

[jodifur]

Happy New Year. My motto is all good things in 2010. Because it has to be true.

[Zandria]

I think you will definitely have some kickass things to share for your 2010 recap post. You DID do a lot of cool stuff in 2009, and as long as you want it and search out those new opportunities, they will continue to present themselves. I'm looking forward to a kickass 2010 myself. :)

[Stimey]

Oh, man, I am a freak magnet too. Imagine if the two of us went out together?

Great post, and you go kick the shit out of this year. You are awesome. Really.

[kris]

Just a gorgeous frank and lovely recap. Love the kindness you're showing yourself -- and the optimism that's making its way into our every days. Big grin here.

Here's to 2010.

[Sarah, Goon Squad Sarah]

I have several things:

1) If you and Stimey are both freak magnets and I love the shit out of both of you, does that make me a freak?

2) THIS is the nicest thing anyone has ever written about me.

3) Should we get one of those charms where someone has half that says "Be Fri" and the other person gets "St ends"?

4) Here's to 2010 and more good hockey seats!

[Sarah, Goon Squad Sarah]

Crap. You don't have html code comments?

http://www.lauriewrites.com/weblog/2009/12/sarah-.html

That is the nicest thing anyone has ever written about me.

[LoriHC]

Ooh, we just might have to meet you in Pittsburgh for the Winter Classic next year! We went to a Penguins game while visiting Pittsburgh this time two years ago, and I said to Al that I wished we were repeating that trip again this year. So much fun! I might even root for the Caps with you. ;-)

[joanna]

Happy New Year! You are never boring, and so full of energy! I love the way you describe growing up "beside" DC. Best depiction. Evah.