As it is the next to last day of 2009, I thought I’d do a little review of the past year.  Then I realized that it’s actually the end of the decade!  So this is my attempt at a mini-memoir of the past ten years.  To be quite honest, I tend to keep the past in the past and just move on.  As a result, much of the decade has been lost in my memories.  The important stuff, however, remained.  Here are the highlights:

(In my mind, middle/high school is measured in school years, so sorry if it’s a bit confusing)

2000: Remember the Y2K scare?  Well something similar is coming up in 2012.  Be prepared!  Actually 8th grade wasn’t very special.  Middle school was just a long streak of indistinguishable trauma.

9th grade: Sept. 11, 2001 was at the beginning of that school year.  Nothing and no one was ever the same.  This was also the year I decided on my career.  Surprisingly, it hasn’t changed.  Though my proposed path has definitely become more windy and twisty, it stays the same.

10th grade: I joined debate and tennis.  This was huge for me.  I only did it because I needed extracurriculars for college apps, but I ended up really enjoying myself.

Summer ‘04: I got my first job this summer at a local pharmacy.  For the first time I had my own money!  I can’t describe the freedom I felt.  Even then I didn’t go crazy with the spending.  I mostly bought food and the occasional outfit.  It’s not that I’m a natural saver or naturally thrifty, but it’s an ingrained trait in me not to spend money that I don’t have.  I will go without until I have money.  Then spend most of the money I do have, after all bills are paid, of course.  It’s not a destructive habit, but perhaps a bit dysfunctional.  I am nothing if not a work in progress. 

I also began to volunteer at the local animal shelter.  I.Loved.It.There.  It was the best time of high school for me.  I wish I had done more volunteering in college, but the shelter was inconvenient to get to in the college town without a car. 

12th grade: Sometime during senior year I bought myself a car.  It was a little red thing that was a bit finnicky but I loved it dearly.   I had to sell it when I left for college, though.  It wouldn’t have made the trip cross-country.

Of course, I got accepted to my top choice college, early decision, no less.  I don’t think I’ve said what college I went to.  I don’t think I’m going to.  Pseudo-anonymity, and all that.

2006: The second half of my freshman year was amazing!  So many small, good things happened.  I don’t actually remember most of them, but it has left me with a warm fuzzy.

I did get an on-campus job.  Once again, I had money, though not much, since they put caps on the allowed number of hours worked.

Also that year, I totally fell in love with music.  I had of course liked music before, but it was always whatever my parents listened to, or the top 40 stuff on the radio.  A friend of mine introduced me to an app that let users download music from others’ ITunes libraries (don’t judge, you know you did it too!).  It began with AIR, then Massive Attack, then Basement Jaxx, and when I actually listened to Daft Punk’s Discovery, it was over.  Here is music that is more than catchy noise.  This is music that tells my story.

2007: I went to Peru.

2008: During this year, I was mostly trying to pull myself together.  I found the most amazing and supportive mentor and lab to work in, and found a focus for my studies and future career.

2009: Well, you know that story.  If not, read the blog.  In brief, I graduated, moved back home, moved out, got a job.

A mini-memoir of the past decade.  These are the things that I believe have made the most impact on me.  Of course, some things may have been left out, but you get the idea.

What are your memories of the past ten years?

P.S. This is my 100th post! Looking forward to the next 100!

Ah, roomies.  I have amused myself mightily reading and listening to stories of people and their roommates.  Sometimes they go well, and everyone is friends, other times, they turn to heck, and I wonder about humanity.  I thought it would be amusing to tell my roommate story. 

I’ve only had one roommate (at my college, everyone lives in suites, so here I’m defining a roommate as someone that shares your actual room).  We were pretty much randomly assigned to each other before freshman year, and at first, I thought we would get along wonderfully, but soon we did little more than tolerate each other. 

My roomie, I’ll call her Mia, and I were very different.  I am taller than the average American woman, a bit sarcastic, not prone to be overly emotional (a post about that coming soon).  Mia is quite short, was a cheerleader in high school, and very into looking the part.  I realized soon that we didn’t have much in common, but tried to stay friendly.  I had made friends during a pre-orientation program that I attended and really had little interest in her.  There were nine girls in that suite, so she had plenty of friends to choose from. 

So the year goes on, and soon enough there’s some drama.  About chores, and about decorating the suite.  First, I wasn’t going to contribute toward brand name furnishings that I was not going to use with people that I already knew I wasn’t going to room with after that year.  I just didn’t have money like that to spare.  About chores, I couldn’t bring myself to clean the upstairs bathroom when I lived downstairs.  It was a matter of principle.  I don’t clean bathrooms that I don’t use unless I’m being paid.  I thought these things were minor, and we had moved past them, but it turns out that Ms. Mia had been talking about me behind my back. 

That was cool, we didn’t have to be friends, and anyway, she quickly got a boyfriend and began spending every night at his place.  Said boyfriend was always a jerk to me, so I can only imagine the things she said to him. 

I don’t want to imply that I was the perfect roomie, because I wasn’t.  I am a homebody  more than anything else, so I was in the room a lot.  Looking back, she probably felt crowded out of our small room, but if she wanted privacy, she could have just asked.  Also, I pretty much ignored her when she was in the room.  That’s just because I don’t talk much unless I have something to say, though I could see how that may make someone like her feel uncomfortable. 

Anyway, through some of the things she said to me and to some friends of mine (who know her through a very different social circle), I came to realize that Mia was totally selfish and spoiled.  I mean, she didn’t even realize that not everyone had swimming pools in her home state of California! (Totally serious there.)  My final straw was when she left the window open with a loose screen, and an open candy bar on her desk.  I woke early the next morning to a squirrel in the room and had to call animal control to get it out.  It seems a silly thing, but you never know, right?  Thankfully, that was only about two months before the end of the school year. 

I haven’t spoken to her since, though I saw her around campus once or twice.  To be honest, I probably wouldn’t recognize her if I saw her walking down the sidewalk tomorrow. 

The next year, I moved into a suite with the most amazing people ever (though I had my own room)!  We stayed together until I moved off campus during senior year.