Obligatory End of the Year Post

Bear with me, this will hopefully be my last navel-gazing post for a while. Something in the air in December makes me really, really introspective.

Remember when you were a kid, and you always listened to grown-ups complaining about time going soooo fast and not knowing what they were talking about? And then all of a sudden you blinked and you were a grown-up?

Well, all of a sudden, I blinked, and I've been out of college and time just keeps going faster and faster and I want to scream stop! I need to enjoy this! But time doesn't listen, because time is a motherfucker.

December of 2004. I graduated college. (Tip for those of you still in college: Don't graduate a semester early.) I had only just met Jon a couple of months previous, and I was still dating him. I went home to NJ. I was antisocial over "winter break" and played a lot of Super Mario World. I had a definite feeling of "Now what?" And in January, I started looking for jobs, starting with a "part-time" job at B&N. (I was full-time inside of 3 weeks. Wheee.)

December of 2005. I was the head cashier at B&N. I spent my time working, sleeping, or drinking at O'Malley's. I think I was depressed. I was disheartened by my inability to find a real job, but still unwilling to look outside of publishing. I got a wretched cold on Christmas Eve. I got dumped and my brand new boots broke all in the same night. I felt trapped. I hated my job. It was bad.

December of 2006. I was an editorial assistant at Prentice Hall. The job was too easy, and I missed Boston. I'd been applying to jobs in Boston unsuccessfully. I'd been so thrilled to get the job, but I was beyond ready to move on, even though I had only been in the job for 10 months. (See: me going on an interview in January, and telling my boss I was doing so. But without that, we wouldn't have any of the stuff in December of 2007) Living at home was driving me insane)

December of 2007. I'm an assistant editor now, all because I did something kinda stupid and really ballsy. Wow. (For the record, the interview was a disaster.) I moved back to Boston, I've got an awesome group of friends here, I was brave and braved the Midwest. For the first time, life is really looking up in December. Even though the EA job > B&N, and B&N > unemployment, I was so...stuck that December sucked. But I had an awesome year, and I'm looking forward to 2008. (I had to double check this earlier. The thing about working in textbook publishing is that you lose track of what year it is, because our copyright years are so skewed from the calendar year.)

I hope your New Year's Eve is everything you want it to be, and that 2008 is an awesome year for everyone.