Goodbye 25

pasta e fagioli

I have no such high hopes for 2010. I may have held the bar a bit too high during for 2009 and my 25th year of life.To make myself feel better about getting old, last year I would tell myself (and everybody else) that I had decided 25 would be the best year of life yet because it's the age everybody wants to be. It seems one very very unfortunate experience and few other mishaps marred the year just when things were starting to get good. But I'd hate to call the entire year a loss. Two-thousand nine took me to Africa. I fell in love with Neko Case, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the Decembrists and Joanna Newsome. I made new friends and spent time with old ones. I realized how truly content I have become. I stopped worrying so much about where I was and where I am heading. I learned about prayer and vegetable canning. I tried a lot of new things and failed at nearly all of them. I laughed a lot. I read even more. And boy did I cook.

If anything, I'd say this year was typical to my life. Dramatic at moments, yet surprisingly simple at others. Incredibly flawed but equally exuberant.

I don't typically make resolutions because yes, they are the sort of thing I won't keep, but mostly because I like to think that my life is in a constant state of transformation. It seems I am teetering back and forth between crisis and recovery--but maybe that's more the way I analyze things versus the way things really are. My current "crisis" state has me wanting to find a balence between caring too much what others think of me and being a bitch. I'm afraid my actions are dictated too often by what I think people want from me. For example, I speak my mind only if I know I won't offend somebody. I go along with things because I don't want to rock the boat. But then it all wells up to a certain point at which I've put up with too much and I go into bitch mode, usually directed only at the people I love most--which is a good thing because then I wouldn't have any friends.