What a year

I realize this comes a few days early, but what the hell.

The coming week brings with it various anniversaries, and in reflecting on them I am keenly aware of the difference that one year in your life makes. If you had come to me on April 22, 2006, and told me that in just a few days so many really significant and life-altering things would happen, I would have told you that you were crazy. Shows how much I know.

I remember exactly what I was doing a year ago. It was a really great weekend- my friends and I were getting ready to go dancing at Picadilly (as everyone knows, getting ready for a dance is so much cooler than the actual dance. Even so, it was a great time). A year ago tomorrow we all went downtown, bought four pizzas, and had fun in a park by the water for a few hours. We made pictures with our shadows, threw super balls at Rob (who tripped over a bench at one point and we spent the rest of the night asking him to remember random words to make sure his head was OK), and had a generally splendid time. That Monday night Katy and I went skipping around the dorm in a roundabout way to get to the vending machines, and Chris came over for a while to talk about rugby, since I wanted to send my brother a package to distract him from a wounded knee. The next day (Tuesday), I mailed Joe's package and spent the rest of the day alternating between classes and nursing Katy, whose vending machine food wasn't sitting well, whom we soon realized had the flu. That was all before about 9pm, when I got the phone call. Nothing has really been the same since.

Seriously, up until the moment the phone rang, I never would have expected the year to become what it did. Many good things came of the bad things. I don't regret that at all. But I was in control of the good things, and the bad things happened independently of my control. And it is very weird (weird is such a weak word. It's nauseating and ominous) to enter this week knowing how different things were at this time last year. It also makes me nervous- so many things came crashing down at once, I'm worried similar things could happen. It could all come crashing down just as easily as it did last year.

There's a line in Sliding Doors, a Gwenyth Paltrow movie in which her character leaves her significant other of three years because he cheats on her, loses her job, starts her own business, gets into a new relationship, gets pregnant, and finds that her new beau is married (or so she thinks). Before she and her boyfriend get everything straightened out, she says to him, "I have been through enough for one year!" Yeah. That was going through my mind around September. I'm glad the rest of the year wasn't so bad. Still, it's weird to think about everything that has happened in one short year.