Forty-Ninth Post
It’s been an interesting twelve months. It’s strange to think, at this moment a year ago, that I was wandering the streets of Amsterdam with some new found English friends, wondering what the heck a foreign New Year celebration would be like. For the record, it was a good time.
Gelukkig Nieuw Jaar, indeed! (Not my photo, but I was totally there, man.)
After spending a few more days in Amsterdam, homesick but also preemptively missing my new friends, I came home and prepared to take the GRE, because I thought, just maybe, that I might be interested in going to grad school. It’s funny how huge plans have their roots in such noncommittal actions. I had not yet begun my research assistantship at the VA (although I’d already started the 30-plus pages of paperwork), so I was still blindly feeling my way towards the possibility that I might become a psychologist. One thing I’ve loved about growing older is that I feel smarter with every passing year – my understanding of what it would take to even consider a PhD was so dim back then! It’s…considerably less dim now.
It wasn’t long before I started volunteering five hours per week at the VA, and not long after that I was offered a full-time paid position. After three years, it became time for me to move on from secretary’ing it up at Harvard. The job had been incredibly good to me, launching my drive to finally get a degree, but the strain of doing something that had very little to do with my desired future had worn on me, and it was clear to everyone that the move was a good one. I was sad to leave, but happy to begin substantive work on what was solidifying as my real-deal future.
It’s easy to forget that we spend more hours in any given week with our coworkers – by far – than with our closest friends.
That’s what this year has been about for me: planning out the ol’ future. I’ve already written a lot about what I’ve been doing at work and school, so I’m not going to rehash it all, but it turns out that laying the groundwork for Dr. Christian is an extremely busy process. I hope he appreciates all of this stuff I’m doing for him! I mean, assuming that he will in fact exist. I wonder what it means when the majority of one’s hours are lived for one’s future…it can’t be healthy, but goddamn if it can be helped. Or maybe that’s how everyone lives anyway?
Speaking of living, I lost my step grandmother this past year. Her name was Nathalie Singletary, and she bought me my first Gameboy when I was a little kid, along with Tetris and Mortal Kombat. It was the original Gameboy, which displayed four colors: lighter green, light green, dark green, and darker green. Imagine Mortal Kombat on that. Anyway, it was a huge gift from someone that wasn’t even a blood relation, so that’s how I’ll always remember her: generous. I cried like a damn baby at her funeral, which is of course par for the course for me…I was so moved by how many lives she’d touched. That was one packed church.
Anyway, big decisions coming.