You take the bad with the good
Entry posted by GSR
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(Disclaimer: Re-reading this in the morning, this got kind of heavy and ventish. The important bit is - 2013 could have been better, but a happy new year to all.)
So 2013 is almost over, huh. I've been reading people's 2013 posts; a lot of people seem to have had a rough year. Or maybe that's not totally accurate - it seems like a lot of people had a really eventful year, and not always in a good way.
Looking back at 2013, I see a lot of good things that happened - and I see the bad stuff that came with them, and how I didn't much have a chance to enjoy the good things. 'Cause if I had to sum up 2013 in a word (I'm not sure why I would have to - some wild, contrived hostage situation, maybe?) it would be busy. I'm about to enter my final semester of college, but sometime around last January my studies started picking up speed and never really stopped.
There were weeks where I would wake up, go to class, and then be at the library or lab until 11 at night. Lunch became optional, dinner became whatever was at the campus union. Sometimes it wasn't enough - for one class, I aced the first project, and thinking I was in good shape for the second, only had about half a week of craziness working on it leading up to the deadline. I bombed that project and wound up sacrificing about my whole final month of class that semester to the final project in the hopes of salvaging my grade.
This summer I was working full-time again. Honestly, that was probably the least-stressful time of the year, at least with regards to offline stuff. It was a 9-to-5 job where my commute was twenty minutes, tops, on foot. Sure, I put in a few nights and weekends throughout the summer, but it was fairly steady. Still, I wound up spending a lot of that free time just... decompressing, for lack of a better term.
Then the fall semester started, and the whole merry-go-round started again. The start of the semester wasn't that bad, really; I got to start researching, and I only had three classes going besides that. But that didn't last long. I had barely enough time to eke out my NaNo goal (compressed into the first three weeks of November) before the end-of-semester firestorm started and just didn't stop. That little notice in my sig about being gone until the "17th or later"? "Later" was the right word to use. My research took a turn for the worse, and until this morning I was back to putting in full days of work. Happy winter break.
But when I step back and look at the year at a whole, and all this trouble - it's hard to describe. The work I did was, for the most part, good work. I pulled very high grades in my classes, I got hired back full-time at my summer job (and will be moving to the Pacific Northwest next August as a result), my research means I'll be graduating with honors and have the door to grad school open (and, y'know, hopefully winds up making a useful contribution to my field), and that NaNo writing that ate up my time - that's still 50,000 words of a story I want to tell. This is all really positive outcomes. And it's not that I hated my studies or job - I'm incredibly lucky that the field I'm interested in is active and hiring.
But I guess that doesn't really change the fact that the bad - the stress, the lack of free time - was still there. There are projects I wanted to do more with that never got off the ground, friends I wanted to get to know better that got pushed back. I was so excited about the BZRPG this year, and I made I think two dozen posts, tops. I wanted to put more time into helping BZP and another forum I'm staff on, and I haven't been able to do as much as I'd hoped.
But flip all that back around, and it's like - what am I complaining about? There are only 24 hours in a day, and thanks to the work I've put in (plus, of course, my circumstances, but a sociocultural analysis of the advantages conferred on me by my educational environment, race, gender, and class was the purview of my final paper in anthropology this semester, not the purview of a BZP blog entry). I feel like I can call myself 'successful' as a soon-to-be grad. And I know there are plenty of folks out there who had a much harder 2013, and who put in far more hard work than I did. And it's not like I was totally without free time or good memories - go through the blog and you can still find me gushing about stuff like Yelling Lawyers 5 or spending America Day in a high-rise.
But to use one last "but"... I'm ready for the year to be over. I can't say it was a bad year. But I'm not sure I'd call it a happy one.
2014 is going to be a year of changes. I have one last semester which (fingers crossed) will be a little lighter than past ones, with some interesting new stuff thrown in, and then... I have a summer off. I don't start work until late August, and I graduate in May. I guess that the real 'good' that I'm hoping will have come from all the above is the good of not having to do it again, or at least not for a while.
In 2014 I want to do the things I shelved in 2013. I want to work on my own projects, to get to know people better (BrickCon or bust!), to help the communities I'm a part of. I want to get home and not be too tired to do anything but check my e-mail and briefly look over BZP and Tumblr once.
That's my New Year's resolution, or at least my New Year's hope - to go back to the things I want to do, and not just the stuff I have to.
(Also dangit I just realized I didn't actually wish a happy new year in this thing. Happy new year! I hope you can do the things you want and not just the things you have to as well. If those are the same thing then you've got it figured out.)
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