2013 and 2014

I didn't get a chance to do this yesterday because I was busy being out enjoying the New Year's celebration and all, but I wanted to take just a brief moment to commemorate in words the end of 2013 and look ahead a bit into 2014. Because really, 2013 was a great year for me, easily the best year I've had in a good five or six years, maybe more.

What made 2013 so great, you may ask? For one thing, I had the best track record with employment than I had in an year since 2007. I worked with Verizon from November of 2012 all the way through the end of April in '13. Then I spent the month of June working for Google, and after a month's hiatus I resumed that job in August and worked through just about the end of October, and have done a few other little temp assignments since then. In terms of my other work, I did a decent amount of writing this year. I clocked a total of 89 blog entries, which may be down from my total in 2012 (100 posts), it's still good enough for my second-highest posts in a year.

I successfully finished a fairly fun project in 2013 as well in the form of my Recommended Reading Challenge, where I read nothing but books other people told me about for an entire year. Yeah, yeah, I know the bulk of it was in 2012, but I'm still counting it! It was part of me meeting my goal of reading 50 books over the course of the year, too.

Hmm, what else made 2013 so great? I guess meeting my wonderful girlfriend counts, right? She was only in the year for the last two months or so but she made them memorable and I'm looking forward to spending this new year with her.

Of course, the year wasn't all wine and roses. I might have worked most of the year, but I ended it pretty solidly out of work. I might have written a lot of blog entries, but it was less than last year, not more; and while all those posts might count as writing, I don't think I finished a fiction project all year long (then again, I'm convinced nobody out there really gives a damn what I write here, let alone what stories I write!). I might have finished that reading challenge project, but the other project I was really excited about starting up this year failed miserably (through very little fault of my own, though). Lastly, I gained back a decent amount of all the weight I lost over the course of 2012.

But those failures have a point, and this is where 2014 comes in. As the new year starts, I am dedicating myself to rectifying those failures. I will write more fiction, even if all it does when it's done is sit on my computer and make me feel proud of myself quietly to myself. I will top my blog posts, and will do so by finding more to do than just review books, movies, and TV shows. I will get back into my healthier living kick and lose this weight again. I will find another project to get into, to get excited about, and to get off the ground successfully.

And I will find a damn job, because none of that stuff will be cheap. And neither is being in a relationship, for that matter!

But it's all worth it when life is good. And life is good.

Happy New Year, y'all.