Some thoughts on the past year...
Dec. 23rd, 2005 11:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
unforthThis is another one of those posts that's more for me than for other people. I've been thinking about writing it since Thanksgiving, and I want to make sure I don't neglect to do so - it's purpose is simply to be a long list of things I remember from the past year, whether they be anecdotes, quotes, things I've learned, or whatever. So yeah, read it if you don't have anything better to do, but it's likely to be long and not terribly interesting to anyone other than me. :) (I realized I really aughta get it done before I left for the holidays, hence posting it today.)
Knowing my memory, some of these things may be from earlier than this year, but what they hey.
1. December 25th, 2004: Christmas day last year was, well, lousy. We have a history of this. (being born out this year, since Jason woke up sick this morning) I felt sick since the 23rd, I'd worked most of the days leading up to X-mas, including my birthday. I had needed a bunch of days off that month (because I was graduating from college, having a party for that, etc.) and had literally battled my boss for every one of them, and was happy that finally I'd gotten off a day I wanted - the 26th. I was going to be bad, though - rather than use it to visit family, I had dreams of using it to go to a Ring of Honor Wrestling show. However, all of it was falling apart, because I was sick, and getting sicker. Christmas morning with my family, I usually am the "gift distributor" but I felt to sick to get up, so someone else did it. Christmas afternoon with Jason's family, I felt sick enough that I planted myself on a couch and told people not to hug me or touch me, lest they be infected. By Christmas night, I'd decided that I needed medical care, pronto, so at 11:00 PM Christmas night we were in an emergency room, where they eventually told me that the reason I felt sick was that I was running a temperature of almost 104. This was, I felt, a good reasons to feel very sick, but it made for a lousy Christmas. Still, I did in fact end up going to wrestling show the next day (despite feeling awful) and I'm glad I did - it sucked, I couldn't cheer or anything, but I got to see Austin Aries beat Samoa Joe for the title (both have appeared on TNA on Spike, for anyone who follows wrestling at all...;) ) and it was totally awesome. And I got out of some days of work, because the hospital wrote me note...that said, I worked a four hour shift a few days later and it almost caused me to faint.
2. All Year: Harry Potter Mania. I wasn't really a big Harry Potter fan a little more than a year ago. Then, as a stress relief near the end of my last semester of undergrad (Dec. 2004) I found myself reading the fourth one...I don't remember why any more. This lead to some memorable exchanges with friends who were ahead of me (I totally fell in love with Sirius, for example, and some niggling memory told me that I had been told by a friend that he was the casualty in the fifth book, but I couldn't really remember, so I turned to a friend and raved about how much I liked him...she didn't even the heart to say that he didn't live, she just nodded when I asked.) Soon after I read the fifth one, and then eagerly awaited the sixth one for all of spring semester. I was working in a bookstore, so HP was in the air as people came in to preorder it and such...by January I had learned the exact day it would be released, for example (July 17th, yo) and other such nonsense like it's title. I also memorized the date of the next movie (Nov. 18th, yo). Somehow, in the course of year, I went from being somewhat indifferent to completely nuts about HP. ;) If only Sirius wasn't dead...sigh
3. Jan - March, 2005: Graduate School. I worked my tail off to apply to 7 different schools. These schools were selected methodically - they couldn't be in New York (except one safety school) because we wanted to move farther away. They couldn't be in the North East, cause the north east is bloody expensive. They had to have a Philosophy department as well as a Library Science program, because at the time we thought that Jason was going to be studying Phil. They couldn't be in the south, cause we didn't want to live in the south, nor could they be on the west coast, because this was too far from our families. The concluding list was still long, though, but I applied to them all, because the hope was that we would get into the same school (though Jason didn't actually end up applying). SUNY Albany (safety school - SUNY graduate schools almost always accept SUNY graduates, which I was), University of Pittsburgh, University of Maryland at College Mall, Indiana University at Bloomington, University of Wisconsin at Madison, University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, Rutgers University. I was really nervous - would be my grades be good enough? My GRE was strong, but my GPA was only a 3.2 (I know, still pretty good) because I had three F's averaged in due to a semester where I dropped out, and so I was freaked out. Still, relief came quickly. I heard back from Indiana Bloomington by the end of January. I had two "first choices" - one was Bloomington, for reasons I couldn't quite define, but I also really wanted to go to Madison, and that was Jason's first choice. We had friends in Madison, people we'd gotten to know at Gencon's over the years, and so we also wanted to go there. And so the acceptances trickled in...I got in Albany next, then Maryland sent me a personalized letter saying how excited they were to have a dual degree with an Asian studies speciality (I still feel guilty about that letter, they sounded so psyched!!). Milwaukee came weirdly - I never actually got an acceptance letter from the library school, just the history department, so I disregarded it - they were the worst school on the list anyway. Rutgers sent me a note saying they were missing application materials, but they ultimately accepted me anyway, even though I never sent them the things they asked for. I held out for Pittsburgh, because they had an excellent archive program I found tempting, and ultimately got in. And still I hadn't heard from Madison - I'd been accepted every where else. And so the battle began. I decided I wanted to go to Bloomington. I called Madison, and they told me I'd probably gotten in, but my Indiana U acceptance was due back on May 1st, and as the day approached I still had nothing from Madison. Jason and I got into multiple arguments. The advantages of moving some where that we knew people were difficult to weigh against a sure thing. Still, I marshalled my arguments, and soon discovered a tidbit of information that made me difficult to beat: Indiana Bloomington was a harsh $700/credit for out of state tuition. Madison, on the other hand, was more $1500 a credit, a truly ludicrous sum that we didn't really have any chance of affording even with loans. Investigation showed that both schools had 3 credits/per class. Ultimately, the money difference was undeniable, and we decided that I go to Bloomington. And it was the right choice of the two - around the middle of May I received a letter from Madison which said that I had been wait listed.
4. Spring 2005: Screwing around. Winter and spring of 2005, I was no longer a student. I had planned to work my tail off - my father no longer needed to pay child support because I was older than 22, and so my income had been cut in half - but my boss flat out refused to give me hours. Worse than that, she kept telling me it would get better, it would get better, so by the time I realized that it WOULDN'T get better, it was too late for me to get another job, because we were moving on June 1st. The end result was I generally worked 10 hours a week and had nothing else to do. Furthermore, we owed our landlord about 1000 dollars that had to be paid off before we left, in addition to normal bills, which meant that we had basically no disposable income at all. So instead of doing anything productive, I screwed around for months. Looking back, I'm not even sure what I DID with my time. I know I sewed, a little, and watched TV, a bit, and read a few books. I spent a fair amount of time packing and cleaning, but not that much relatively speaking, I played some video games, and I gamed several nights a week. Beyond that? I'm really not sure where the time went, it just sort of dissapted. I needed to relaxation time, though - I was a nightmare by the end of my last semester of undergrad, the whole term was just so stressful (I wrote over 100 pages that semester - including two seminar papers, and went to all my classes and such, and did almost all of my reading). A lot of time was just spent in the presence of friends. Five years in a relatively small group of people had whittled away most of my friends down to a small core of people who I truly and strongly felt for - Jason Davis (as opposed to my Jason), Ryan, Jen, and Aaron were pretty much it. (The last three were also my housemates.) And we knew we were leaving, and none of them were...it was tough, really.
5. Spring 2005: Golden Age. The end of Golden Age was a sad, sad thing. I started in January of 2001, when the game was already many years older than me. It's where I got to know Jason, where I spent ever single Sunday night with only scattered exceptions over the years I lived in Binghamton. Kevin might have been low on ideas, but we still got together every week. I won the love of the Scout, lost friends to the time stream, missed the characters of players who no longer lived in Binghamton. I had favorite moments over the years, many of them. However, it became clear over the course of the semester that the game would not continue after we left Binghamton. The war was almost over, one of the PC's had died badly in April. Most of the players didn't want to play with most of the other players. Jason Davis (player of Scout) made no secret (at least not to us) of the fact that he mostly played to interact with Enigma (my character). The last session was the day before we moved. It had it's ups and downs, but I miss it still some how, all of us sitting around Kevin's living room...
6. Spring 2005: Golden Age - Off Camera. This is also memorable to me. Golden age had few players who hung out past about 2 AM, and by that hour usually me and Jason Davis were done (Golden Age was almost always run for small groups of 2 or 3 - going solo was not unheard of - only in rare occasions were things done as by everyone). This meant that the two of us were sitting around with nothing to do. We'd usually start talking about random stuff, like the past, but ultimately, we always ended up in the same place: roleplaying for hours and hours as our characters for Jason's Menzoberanzan game. The Menzo game was seeing drastic changes as all of us start to shift from being evil underdark drow to not-so-evil surface drow, and the conversations after Golden Age solidified so much between Darthanti (Jason) and Valanna (me).
Why do things always go so much longer than I anticipate? I don't have the time to sit here and ramble more about my past year, even though there is so much more to say! Hopefully I'll get the time later...
Knowing my memory, some of these things may be from earlier than this year, but what they hey.
1. December 25th, 2004: Christmas day last year was, well, lousy. We have a history of this. (being born out this year, since Jason woke up sick this morning) I felt sick since the 23rd, I'd worked most of the days leading up to X-mas, including my birthday. I had needed a bunch of days off that month (because I was graduating from college, having a party for that, etc.) and had literally battled my boss for every one of them, and was happy that finally I'd gotten off a day I wanted - the 26th. I was going to be bad, though - rather than use it to visit family, I had dreams of using it to go to a Ring of Honor Wrestling show. However, all of it was falling apart, because I was sick, and getting sicker. Christmas morning with my family, I usually am the "gift distributor" but I felt to sick to get up, so someone else did it. Christmas afternoon with Jason's family, I felt sick enough that I planted myself on a couch and told people not to hug me or touch me, lest they be infected. By Christmas night, I'd decided that I needed medical care, pronto, so at 11:00 PM Christmas night we were in an emergency room, where they eventually told me that the reason I felt sick was that I was running a temperature of almost 104. This was, I felt, a good reasons to feel very sick, but it made for a lousy Christmas. Still, I did in fact end up going to wrestling show the next day (despite feeling awful) and I'm glad I did - it sucked, I couldn't cheer or anything, but I got to see Austin Aries beat Samoa Joe for the title (both have appeared on TNA on Spike, for anyone who follows wrestling at all...;) ) and it was totally awesome. And I got out of some days of work, because the hospital wrote me note...that said, I worked a four hour shift a few days later and it almost caused me to faint.
2. All Year: Harry Potter Mania. I wasn't really a big Harry Potter fan a little more than a year ago. Then, as a stress relief near the end of my last semester of undergrad (Dec. 2004) I found myself reading the fourth one...I don't remember why any more. This lead to some memorable exchanges with friends who were ahead of me (I totally fell in love with Sirius, for example, and some niggling memory told me that I had been told by a friend that he was the casualty in the fifth book, but I couldn't really remember, so I turned to a friend and raved about how much I liked him...she didn't even the heart to say that he didn't live, she just nodded when I asked.) Soon after I read the fifth one, and then eagerly awaited the sixth one for all of spring semester. I was working in a bookstore, so HP was in the air as people came in to preorder it and such...by January I had learned the exact day it would be released, for example (July 17th, yo) and other such nonsense like it's title. I also memorized the date of the next movie (Nov. 18th, yo). Somehow, in the course of year, I went from being somewhat indifferent to completely nuts about HP. ;) If only Sirius wasn't dead...sigh
3. Jan - March, 2005: Graduate School. I worked my tail off to apply to 7 different schools. These schools were selected methodically - they couldn't be in New York (except one safety school) because we wanted to move farther away. They couldn't be in the North East, cause the north east is bloody expensive. They had to have a Philosophy department as well as a Library Science program, because at the time we thought that Jason was going to be studying Phil. They couldn't be in the south, cause we didn't want to live in the south, nor could they be on the west coast, because this was too far from our families. The concluding list was still long, though, but I applied to them all, because the hope was that we would get into the same school (though Jason didn't actually end up applying). SUNY Albany (safety school - SUNY graduate schools almost always accept SUNY graduates, which I was), University of Pittsburgh, University of Maryland at College Mall, Indiana University at Bloomington, University of Wisconsin at Madison, University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, Rutgers University. I was really nervous - would be my grades be good enough? My GRE was strong, but my GPA was only a 3.2 (I know, still pretty good) because I had three F's averaged in due to a semester where I dropped out, and so I was freaked out. Still, relief came quickly. I heard back from Indiana Bloomington by the end of January. I had two "first choices" - one was Bloomington, for reasons I couldn't quite define, but I also really wanted to go to Madison, and that was Jason's first choice. We had friends in Madison, people we'd gotten to know at Gencon's over the years, and so we also wanted to go there. And so the acceptances trickled in...I got in Albany next, then Maryland sent me a personalized letter saying how excited they were to have a dual degree with an Asian studies speciality (I still feel guilty about that letter, they sounded so psyched!!). Milwaukee came weirdly - I never actually got an acceptance letter from the library school, just the history department, so I disregarded it - they were the worst school on the list anyway. Rutgers sent me a note saying they were missing application materials, but they ultimately accepted me anyway, even though I never sent them the things they asked for. I held out for Pittsburgh, because they had an excellent archive program I found tempting, and ultimately got in. And still I hadn't heard from Madison - I'd been accepted every where else. And so the battle began. I decided I wanted to go to Bloomington. I called Madison, and they told me I'd probably gotten in, but my Indiana U acceptance was due back on May 1st, and as the day approached I still had nothing from Madison. Jason and I got into multiple arguments. The advantages of moving some where that we knew people were difficult to weigh against a sure thing. Still, I marshalled my arguments, and soon discovered a tidbit of information that made me difficult to beat: Indiana Bloomington was a harsh $700/credit for out of state tuition. Madison, on the other hand, was more $1500 a credit, a truly ludicrous sum that we didn't really have any chance of affording even with loans. Investigation showed that both schools had 3 credits/per class. Ultimately, the money difference was undeniable, and we decided that I go to Bloomington. And it was the right choice of the two - around the middle of May I received a letter from Madison which said that I had been wait listed.
4. Spring 2005: Screwing around. Winter and spring of 2005, I was no longer a student. I had planned to work my tail off - my father no longer needed to pay child support because I was older than 22, and so my income had been cut in half - but my boss flat out refused to give me hours. Worse than that, she kept telling me it would get better, it would get better, so by the time I realized that it WOULDN'T get better, it was too late for me to get another job, because we were moving on June 1st. The end result was I generally worked 10 hours a week and had nothing else to do. Furthermore, we owed our landlord about 1000 dollars that had to be paid off before we left, in addition to normal bills, which meant that we had basically no disposable income at all. So instead of doing anything productive, I screwed around for months. Looking back, I'm not even sure what I DID with my time. I know I sewed, a little, and watched TV, a bit, and read a few books. I spent a fair amount of time packing and cleaning, but not that much relatively speaking, I played some video games, and I gamed several nights a week. Beyond that? I'm really not sure where the time went, it just sort of dissapted. I needed to relaxation time, though - I was a nightmare by the end of my last semester of undergrad, the whole term was just so stressful (I wrote over 100 pages that semester - including two seminar papers, and went to all my classes and such, and did almost all of my reading). A lot of time was just spent in the presence of friends. Five years in a relatively small group of people had whittled away most of my friends down to a small core of people who I truly and strongly felt for - Jason Davis (as opposed to my Jason), Ryan, Jen, and Aaron were pretty much it. (The last three were also my housemates.) And we knew we were leaving, and none of them were...it was tough, really.
5. Spring 2005: Golden Age. The end of Golden Age was a sad, sad thing. I started in January of 2001, when the game was already many years older than me. It's where I got to know Jason, where I spent ever single Sunday night with only scattered exceptions over the years I lived in Binghamton. Kevin might have been low on ideas, but we still got together every week. I won the love of the Scout, lost friends to the time stream, missed the characters of players who no longer lived in Binghamton. I had favorite moments over the years, many of them. However, it became clear over the course of the semester that the game would not continue after we left Binghamton. The war was almost over, one of the PC's had died badly in April. Most of the players didn't want to play with most of the other players. Jason Davis (player of Scout) made no secret (at least not to us) of the fact that he mostly played to interact with Enigma (my character). The last session was the day before we moved. It had it's ups and downs, but I miss it still some how, all of us sitting around Kevin's living room...
6. Spring 2005: Golden Age - Off Camera. This is also memorable to me. Golden age had few players who hung out past about 2 AM, and by that hour usually me and Jason Davis were done (Golden Age was almost always run for small groups of 2 or 3 - going solo was not unheard of - only in rare occasions were things done as by everyone). This meant that the two of us were sitting around with nothing to do. We'd usually start talking about random stuff, like the past, but ultimately, we always ended up in the same place: roleplaying for hours and hours as our characters for Jason's Menzoberanzan game. The Menzo game was seeing drastic changes as all of us start to shift from being evil underdark drow to not-so-evil surface drow, and the conversations after Golden Age solidified so much between Darthanti (Jason) and Valanna (me).
Why do things always go so much longer than I anticipate? I don't have the time to sit here and ramble more about my past year, even though there is so much more to say! Hopefully I'll get the time later...
