The Days Are Long, But the Years are Short: 2019 in Retrospect

2019...so that just happened. 

The other evening, I spent an hour or so flipping through my old planners and my memory journal, to try to get a sense of how I spent my time in this past year. I came away with some vague sense that I spent far too much time re-reading old favorite books, dicking about on my phone, and worrying about things that never came to pass (or at least, haven't yet.) Other highlights from the year now gone...In the 365 days of this past year, I:

• Attended approximately 800 meetings at work
• Worried for two weeks in February that I was going to die of breast cancer. (Spoiler alert: I didn't die. The mammogram came back clear.)
• Attended the first match of the Indy 11 soccer season
• Didn't attend enough therapy, but made good use of the sessions I did manage to afford
• Read way too much fanfic
• Got my heart broken by Avengers: End Game. Marvel, you betrayed us, utterly and totally.
• Celebrated an absolutely magical 39th birthday with a friend in the Rocky Mountains
• Suffered through a stress-induced eye twitch through most of August
• Decided to finally give notice at my second job
• Tried to re-learn the art of talking  about things other than work, and to build a life outside of my professional existence
• Wrote in my memory journal, more than once, that my biggest accomplishment of the day was "Didn't smack anyone!" Perhaps the bigger miracle is that no-one smacked me
• Enjoyed the best meal ever at Public Greens in Downtown Indy
• Threw a baby shower--and pulled it off quite credibly, I might add!
• Spent a fair amount of time on Christmas Eve making goo-goo eyes at Miles Alexander, the newborn son of my friends Michael and Anna
• Traveled about in Tropical North Queensland for two weeks, swimming with sharks and turtles and stingrays
• Learned that, even on the other side of the world, when swimming about in the Great Barrier Reef, I get crippled with a huge, burdensome sense of inferiority and unworthiness. Crying in your prescription snorkel mask as you swim frantically away from an aggressive Titan Triggerfish? That's a bucket list experience I hadn't been counting on but nonetheless got to cash in on. Hooray.

2019 was a year of...well, I'm not sure. It was a year. Not the best. Not the worst. It flew by, like a roller-coaster, mostly, and I reckon that's pretty darned apt. When you're whizzing about on a roller coaster, it's kinda hard to pick up a lot of individual scenes and details; it's all flying by in a blur and really, you're just holding on and trying not to plummet to your death. And that's just about the best way to sum up 2019. Hopefully 2020 will be more of a leisurely mosey down a relatively smooth path.