2002 has been a weird year. I've done a lot of things I wanted to do, but also wasted more time navel-gazing and depressed than since I was a freshman in college. It seems the older I get, the less grown-up I feel. And while I honestly don't mind aging, I'm often disappointed that I don't emotionally feel as old as I think I ought to. I should be more together by now. Less broken. More Adult. And not in the XXX or NC-17 way.

This has really been an odd year:

• We bought a house.
• I had a major bad thing with a friend, which ended far better than I hoped at the time.
• I quit belly dancing, which sucked and was very disappointingly handled by my teacher.
• I wrote porn.
• I went to Pantheacon for the first time and had some amazing experiences.
• My father had a heart attack.
• I learned to crochet.
• The dog got really sick.
• I saw a lot of my great-aunt, eventually culminating with the trip to Paris at the end of the year.
• I went to my first out-of-town work conference.
• I led rituals for Beltane and Samhain.
• I discovered slash.
• I had some kind of weird thing that I think is a little too run-of-the-mill to label as a "nervous breakdown" but still an event that triggered about six months of depression. (Or more, depending on if I consider it to be over or not.)
• I saw a therapist for the first time ever.
• My coven had an initiation.
• I think I finally "got over" some ex-SOs.
• I learned what depression is really like, and that people who talk about not being able to do anything about it aren't just being whiney and pathetic. Well, not entirely.
• I had an ovarian cyst burst.
• I went backpacking by myself.
• I wrote the longest, most coherent plot-based story I've ever written, at ~90 pages in MS Word.
• I went to Paris.
• I ate oysters and mussels for the first time.
• I saw and held more babies than ever before.
• My story was banned from a site for being too sexually graphic.
• I hosted Xmas at my house for the first time.

Wow. I should flip through my day planner more often. This has been a busy year after all. I'm not entirely sure what I've learned from all of these past events, but I suppose the point of life is to keep learning from them, instead of declaring myself done and the lessons learned. I'm trying though, to learn to keep things small.

This year, I don't want to make any grandiose resolutions that I'll fail to achieve. I want to spend more time with my friends than I have lately. More time reading fiction than non-fiction. More time writing, of course. Go to England for two weeks. Change jobs or cut this one back to part-time so I can increase my schooling and get it over with faster, before I start to really hate it and change my mind about being a librarian. Try to learn how to be more patient with myself, more accepting of the days when all I want to do is hide under the covers and pretend nothing exists. Maybe plant some flowers and get the house repairs underway. Spend more time with the dog before he gets old. Get old before I die. Grow up.

Maybe.

Columns by Wanton Hussy