I don’t check the traffic stats for this site often, maybe once every six months. If I were trying to make money here I might care a little more, but since most of Prepoceros is me watching myself type . . . meh. I did pull them up a few days ago to write the NaBlo recap and was reminded of my favorite type of web statistics: search terms! Folks have found their way here on the hunt for all sorts of wacky things. Shall I share?

We’ll start with the mundane and move toward unfathomability. By far the most popular phrase that brings people to Prepoceros is “GRE percentiles,” which I assume leads them to these posts. Popular variations on this theme include “GRE percentile curve,” “how to know GRE percentiles,” and “GRE quantitative 800.” I also get a good number of hits from people searching for information on the LSAT, like “what to eat the morning of the LSAT” and “why is the LSAT so damned hard?” and a few more from people searching for SAT or ISEE information.

People have also found me by searching on my full name, or on my name plus some identifying information, as in “natalie lastname harvey mudd” or, recently, “natalie lastname houston blog.” I don’t have a firm policy on how searchable I’d like to be. My thoughts on that topic are rambly and best saved for another post*.

I think occasionally people who come here via search engine might actually have found what they were looking for, and that warms my heart a little . . . connectedness and all that. Each of the following is a search term about which something useful—lists, discussion, or maybe a link—can be found on my site. (Pssst! Search bar, top right.)

puppy nicknames
adjectives ending in ly
rhymes with junk
footie pajamas for grown ups
words that tickle the tongue
jejune definition
pictures of hurricane rita from texas
cherry preserves houston nutcracker market
hold our slide rules high
plural for starbucks
my axiom of choice you know it’s true
veere middelburg

Then there are the phrases which *might* have hit their intended targets, but it’s hard to say what the folks behind these were thinking. Want to read the archives, but don’t have hours to spare? Here’s a twenty-second highlight reel of the last eighteen months of my life:

hate tvmax
death obsession
overcooked pasta
flea bomb didn’t work
tomorrow’s going to suck
severe butt bruise
teaching lsat
astroporn
classical studies
something happen to my brain
shit i need to go to bed

One surprisingly common phrase has been “eager to please synonym,” a reference to this post. I DON’T KNOW EITHER, PEOPLE. But do let me know if you find a good one, thanks.

Here are some phrases I remember referencing, but which I’m fairly certain this site contains no useful information about:

swankie blankie
collapsible hamper
leta armstrong
floating cinema
glass menagerie jonquil
pas de drapeau pas de pays
22 degree halo

And finally, the most entertaining category: the WTFs. Today’s title is taken from this group. Reading through these brings up so many questions, like “How many pages of ‘fisting’ results did you have to flip through to get to my link?” and “When did I ever say ‘bongoballs’?” I could search for these things myself, I suppose, but I prefer to preserve the sense of mystery.

barbie jet
wowdy woo
anodyne machine [I don't even know what this is]
video clips of whole severe thunderstorms going over
ancient dildo
how electricity runs through dvds
take apart put back together working
good traction shoes [I *wish* I had some of those to write about]
words that mean something else [something besides . . . what they mean?]
shameless sexgirls
myspace and modern dance dance and layout
petsmart groomers killed my dog [two similar searches -- this has happened more than once? More than NEVER?]
what will happen if my dog ate 24 ibuprofen
stuffed moose for wax dipping
me naked highschool [sorry to disappoint]
animated weather in bulgaria
essays on walnut cookies

So there you have it. By typing those in, I’ve now guaranteed that the next person looking for a stuffed moose for wax dipping will come here FIRST. Hello, weird moose candle person!

Since I can’t think of a way to conclude this post, I’ll shoot off in a tangential direction and mention that for some reason I’ve suddenly remembered my dream from this morning. In one vivid scene, I was Britney Spears, and I was taking a huge dump in a tiny office. The rest of it was actually rather nightmarish — part of the time I was in Jennifer Aniston’s body, I think, in a fabulous dress, which was nice, but I was desperately running from some horrible people who wanted me for a crime I hadn’t committed. I nearly drowned several times and barely escaped being crushed by the pieces of a very complicated elevator. I tried to hide in the locker room of a public pool, but I didn’t have the right color towel, so they spotted me right away. And the worst of it is that you stopped caring several sentences ago. Good night.

———
* I removed my last name from the “about” page here a few months ago**, but there are still a few old comments lying around signed with my full name and linked here. I could ask the owners of those blogs to edit my comments, but I haven’t decided I want to be that anal about it yet.

** . . . and five minutes ago I got the bright idea to search my own site and turned up another reference I hadn’t noticed, in an old post. D’oh.

My thoughts exactly. Jebus.

Since I’m a Stats dork, let’s start with a quick rundown of November’s numbers:

Days: 30
Posts: 31
Links: 44
Comments: 19
Unique visitors: 1362
Hits from the NaBloPoMo Randomizer: 164
Total words: 10138
Fewest words in one post: 2
Most words in one post: 1256
Median words per post: 236
Posts published before noon: 4
After 11 PM: 19
After 11:50 PM: 9
Median timestamp: 11:13 PM
* Footnotes: 24
Exclamation points!: 21
WORDS IN ALL CAPS: 46
That thing where I use a question mark on something that’s not a question to indicate rising intonation?: 19

There are your cold, rational numbers—now, how did forced posting make me *feel*? In short, mildly stressed. Midnight deadlines do not mesh well with my procrastinatory style. No matter when I got home, “come up with a NaBloPoMo post” was always the next thing due, which would make it the first thing I could not-do. The plan was that I’d bang out the day’s post first, then move on to homework and chores and whatnot. But I didn’t have any ideas for a post right then, so I’d just read a few blogs, maybe watch a couple videos while I brainstormed . . . and then all of sudden it was minutes to midnight and I’d accomplished nothing. Not that I was a chore machine before November, but nightly posting deadlines didn’t help.

As both of my readers can attest, the quality of my November posts was, um, substandard. Out of those 31, I would’ve considered only twelve or thirteen inflictable on the world in an ordinary month. Blog “inspiration,” to put it pretentiously, usually pops up while I’m out and about, not while I’m sitting in front of a blank screen at 11:50. Long, edited, multi-day posts weren’t possible during NaBloPoMo, or at least they weren’t for me. Someone who planned better and started things earlier, maybe keeping a few working drafts going at all times, might have been able to manage it, but as you can see in the stats above, “starting early” is not my forte.

I don’t mean to bash the ‘Mo. NaNoWriMo, NaBloPoMo, and all the other NaBleeBlooBlahs out there are fabulous ideas, IMHO, and good motivational tools (if you can find one that fits your aspirations). The difference between WriMo and PoMo is that the former’s are writing deadlines, whereas the latter’s are publishing deadlines. While this is certainly better suited to a communal experience (which is what blogging is all about, yes?), it sure makes for a lot of unedited crap flooding into the ‘sphere (at least from these fingers).

Would I do it again? Sort of. I like the idea of blogging every day, but I wouldn’t commit to *publishing* every day. In one sense, yes, this blog is my personal sandbox, but it’s my *public* personal sandbox. It may be my inalienable right to write boring blah-di-blah that’s not worth anyone’s time to read if I want to, but I can just as well save that crap to my hard drive or write it in a paper notebook.

NaBloPoMo: an experiment worth trying, and worth adapting. I’m looking forward to next year’s NaBloWriMo.

Since last year’s pseudo-NaNoWriMo effort was a near-complete failure, I’ve decided to go at it from a different angle this time around. I’m falling in with the scores and scores of bloggers who’ve agreed to participate in National Blog Posting Month, officially hosted at the fabulous Fussy, which you should all read anyway, yes you should. Visit the official site here.

The only rule is that you have to post something to your blog every day. I usually post three or four times a week anyway, so I’m not expecting this to be a huge stretch for me, though it will be an exercise in discipline, which goodness knows I could use a smidge more of. There’s no crazy word count expectation like those crazy novelists have, but at the end of the month I’ll add it all up so I can have a big shiny number to look at and wonder how much I could’ve accomplished if I’d put those words towards something productive.

For the last few weeks I’ve been considering several variations on blank-blank-blank-Mo: making a new video every day, posting a new photo to Flickr every day, cooking something new every day…you get the idea. Although I thought for a while that I’d do ALL THOSE THINGS AT ONCE, I eventually came to my senses and chose the option at which I was most likely to succeed. I’ve demonstrated much over-ambition in the past, so it’s probably good to start small. The fancier projects can still happen next month, if this one goes well.

I’ve been idly trying to come up with a theme for this month, a series of posts I could do that would hang together somehow, would explore every nook and cranny of some part of the world in nauseating, exhaustive detail, but so far I got nothin’. If anyone has any brilliant theme ideas, I’d love to hear them.

It’s not too late to join the fun yourself, if you’d like. Don’t have a blog? You can make this your National De-Lurking Month. Every day, comment on a different blog. Simple, yes? It could be one you’ve been reading for a while, or one that’s new to you. To facilitate this, I think I’ll post a link here every day to a blog I read and would recommend*. Today’s link already happened, but in case you can’t be bothered to scroll up, I’ll remind you again to go read Fussy. Damnit.

Off to bed. Will I post actual content tomorrow? Oooh, suspense.

———
* I hereby declaim all responsibility for any addiction or loss of contact with the non-interwebby world that may result. If you’d like to be one of my linkees, or if you think I might link you and would rather I didn’t, let me know.

Remember that Blogger SAT Challenge thing I mentioned a while back? Well, the scores are in, and the results have been published on a blog created just for the Challenge, which you can visit here.

Even if you didn’t write an essay for the challenge (and I haven’t heard from anyone who did), you should go check it out. All 109 essays composed for the challenge are posted, and the general blog-reading public is invited to rate them (to compare their scores with those given by us “expert graders”).

The broad-brush, general first impression of the results? Bloggers are no better than high school students at writing timed SAT-style essays. Much discussion is sure to follow on the site, on Chad’s and Dave’s blogs, and elsewhere on the statistical breakdown of the scores, common characteristics of blog-writing and how those mesh with the goals of the SAT, the validity of the test for measuring writing skill and college-readiness, and of course what this means for our students, the fabric of our society, and the universe as a whole.

I have to zip off to school now, but I’ll certainly be commenting on all of this later, probably both here and at ScienceBlogs. The standardized-test dork in me is totally psyched.

You know what’s almost* as fun to read as a real post? That’s right! A post explaining why there aren’t any real posts. This right here? That’s what this is.

I have two whole posts written out in my head, you see, and I really do mean that—I’ve even worked out most of the wording. I haven’t had time to type anything up for the last four or five days in a row because I’ve gotten home after dark every night and had more homework (and workwork) than time. Today I got home “early” at around 7:45, and yet, five hours later, I have nothing to show for my evening except a thrice-walked puppy, a load of laundry, and a half-clean bathroom. Now that it’s getting late, I won’t even have a full night’s sleep to show for it, either.

I’ll try not to bore you with whiny details, but I’m frustrated by my aversion to “doing things,” even THINGS I LIKE TO DO. I like blogging. I was excited about what I was going to write tonight—I thought it up while I was walking Sam, and it seemed like a good fit for today and possibly even interesting to people who are not me. And yet. I’ve been “about to start writing” for the last three or four hours. Ugh. Bed. This three-day weekend can’t come soon enough**.

EDIT: Sorry for the excessive grouchiness. Today has been an up-and-down, emotional sort of day, mostly for reasons beyond my control. I did have a lovely sandwich, though.

———
* Slight exaggeration.

** I have deleted and rewritten this sentence several times. Looking forward to things upsets me; I feel as though I’m wishing the future would be here now, which, in my current state of mind, is about the most horrible thing I can imagine wishing for. I feel like I’m jinxing myself by writing it down.

So I’ve been working lately. As in actual teaching work, work that people pay me for. While it’s nice to have money and things to do, this means that I’ve been letting some of the “work” I was doing earlier, like editing videos, cleaning my apartment, and blogging, slide a bit. (Ok, really I was never cleaning my apartment, but we can pretend, right?)

Even YouTube. I used to spend all my time on the Tube, ostensibly to connect with people and be creative, but really to avoid all the other things I ought to have been doing. Even that’s fallen off now, and I haven’t posted a new video in over a week.

I don’t know where that train of thought was going, except perhaps that I haven’t updated this here ode to myself in several days and am not feeling particularly inspired by my day-to-day life at the moment, so it’s time to pull an idea out of the vault.

I’m going to go through my old blog posts—all 3.5 years of them—and pull up every post made on the 8th of some month. (I hope it’ll still be the 8th when I post this.) I’ll pick one sentence from each entry and make a mash-up post right here in this very space. Daring, eh?

But wait, there’s more. I’ve been wondering how to translate the idea of randomness from my aleatory video into a blog post, and I think this is as good a time as any to try it out. Along with my “intelligently-designed” mash-up, I’ll make two others out of randomly selected sentences from the same entries.

If you’re in the mood, see if you can figure out which of the posts below is the one I created “purposefully.” A correct guess earns you an imaginary cookie, by which I mean I will bake you a cookie and eat it in your honor. Imaginary for you, delicious for me. A good plan, yes? I’ve ordered the paragraphs below randomly as well, so don’t bother trying to “get inside my head” and guess where I’ve hidden the real one.

#A#

who was this guy? But I can talk about things besides myself too…really, I swear. By the by, I just retyped this entire entry from memory after xanga ate the first one, so…appreciate it. Tournament! Tonight when I got there I really hadn’t eaten lunch or dinner, so I took a break to snack on some of the food I’d just bought (mmm, delicious embezzlement). Why would you give all that up?! You speak eloquently and have seemingly read every book ever published. Anyway, you’ve probably heard by now about the Genesis crash. It is the end of the week, after all, and we all know by now what that does to Natalie’s schedule. Now, if there were only some way to apply this magical ‘studying’ thing to school… I’m a huge fan of logic puzzles, so I forwent dinner to solve this one. Severe thunderstorms, hail, and 70 mph wind gusts expected. Martyrdom is fun and easy. Creepy. Clearly I would make an excellent senator. D’oh.

#B#

won’t that duct tape smart when they rip it off? Haha, so maybe nobody cares about that…but what am I doing wrong? And what if someone put a big magnet next to your eye? Woohoo! I spent a good 5 or 6 hours doing math and eating bagels, and it was GLORIOUS. An excellent choice for masochists. Heh heh heh. Anyway, you’ve probably heard by now about the Genesis crash. This one’s awful, and it’s only going to get worse. I could win an irrational fretting contest with one hand tied behind my back. Undaunted, I grabbed a stack of index cards and two colored markers, cleared a space on the floor, and had the thing solved within five minutes. Rock. As a physics major in a history class, I feel I have something to prove. It’s not something I get to experience often. Clearly I would make an excellent senator. And life should totally revolve around instant gratification, right?

#C#

and the board? LOTR? Drew Carey, tonight at the Muddhole. Wish us luck! What threat to the Bush administration are you? When I was in ninth grade, we were assigned a biography project on an author of our choice. What people love: You can answer almost any question people ask, and have thus been nicknamed Jeeves. It’s the first time anybody’s brought space-things back to Earth since the last Apollo mission in 1972. It is the end of the week, after all, and we all know by now what that does to Natalie’s schedule. I’m going to bed now. I’m a huge fan of logic puzzles, so I forwent dinner to solve this one. We thought we’d have a picnic outside, but after a week of gorgeous spring weather, we’re under a tornado watch. My enthusiasm will wear off, I’m sure, as the semester wears me down, but hopefully I can hold out for longer than I’ve done before. It’s not something I get to experience often. (I’ll be stopping by later to pick up my country club membership, fine cigars, and loose women, thanksmuch.) Oh wait.

Okay, wow. That was an assload of work, and for what? Goodness only knows, but now I can (1) go to bed and (2) cross this idea off my list of “things to blog.” If you want to look these posts up for yourselves, here’s a list of the months in which I posted something on the 8th. I’m not going to bother linking them—the archives are in the sidebar. Apparently April 8th is a never-fail blogging-day for me. Who knew?

2003: April
2004: February, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November
2005: April, May, September, November
2006: February, April

Feel free to leave your guesses in the comments. Reading the three paragraphs, I think it’s fairly obvious which one was intelligently designed, relatively incoherent though it is, but that may be because I can see the twisted, made-up logic behind it. I’m interested to see what y’all come up with—will it be obvious to you, too, or will your human brains conjure up order from randomness and be led astray?

If you pay attention to the ‘Recent Comments’ section, perhaps you’ve noticed that I’ve been getting tons of comment spam lately. This hasn’t been a big problem for most of the last twelve months, but in the last week or so I’ve been getting maybe fifty fake comments a day, and it’s a bitch to go through and clean them all out.

Unfortunately, to keep the spammers out of my face, I’m going to have to mildly inconvenience some of you nice people along the way. I’ve switched the comment settings so that it sends each commenter’s first comment to moderation. If I deem your comment worthy to appear on this hallowed page (the bar is really low here, folks—all you have to do is not be a dirty spammer), then you are considered an “approved” commenter and may comment freely for all eternity.

I don’t know whether those of you who have commented on previous posts will be labeled “approved” or whether your first comment will go into the moderation queue. If you’d like to use this post to test that out, go nuts. Let me know what happens.

I’m sorry to do this, and maybe I’ll be so sorry that I’ll switch back to open commenting in the future. I *could* block individual spammers as they come up, but that feels like a stopgap solution. Right now I have more new spammers than new commenters, so I think this will save time on my end. Spambots are poo-heads.

…when you *know* you’ve seen something a million billion times, and in fact you walk past it every day, but as soon as you need it, you can’t find it? If you’ve ever seen my apartment, you can probably guess that this happens to me all the damn time.

I sat down to write a post this evening, and after discarding one particularly horrible, easy-to-write but depressing-to-read idea*, I realized I couldn’t think of a thing to talk about.

This is not to say that I don’t *have* things to talk about—I’m coming up with potential blog ideas all the time, but since I never write them down, most of what ends up on Prepoceros either is the result of a chance triggering of memory or happens right here in my computer alcove.

About a year ago I bought a lovely little Moleskine** to deal with this exact problem (and to make my life more coherent in general—I see so many interesting things, only to forget them within hours). Though I’ve only used it sporadically since then, I’ve always thought of it as something the “ideal Natalie” would carry with her everywhere, jotting down names, new books to read, brilliant world-changing ideas, etc.

So when I went searching for a topic and came up empty-handed (empty-minded?), I decided to fetch my Moleskine and put it in my bag RIGHT NOW so I wouldn’t forget.

Now, I swear to you that I have seen this nondescript little notebook every single day since I moved here three months ago. I promise you (though I don’t know why you’d care) that it is sitting in some very prominent place in my apartment.

And yet.

I feel like I’ve seen it in a drawer, but it’s not in either one. I know it was behind my old CPU just a little while ago, but it’s not there either. I remember shuffling it around constantly in order to pile up unopened mail on the bar, but ten minutes of picking through every old marker and scrap of paper in the whole bar area failed to turn up any sign of my precious Moleskine.

I’ve even checked the non-obvious places like my nightstand, the bathroom drawers, and the top of the refrigerator. No dice. Frustration.

Perhaps I’m misremembering the seeing-it-every-day thing because this plain black square-ish object vaguely resembles so many other things in my apartment—phone charger, PDA, small books, camera tripod, computer cables—that I recall seeing its various attributes without ever having seen the object itself. Does that make sense? Does it sound like a complete load of pseudo-cogsci crap? (Hint: it is.)

Long story short, I can’t find the notebook. Looked and looked. Really, my apartment isn’t very big, so I imagine it’ll turn up eventually, especially if I, I dunno, clean up around here or something, but dagnabbit, I could’ve *sworn* I saw it on this very desk just the other day . . .

———
* I cannot walk my dog at night any more without at least briefly considering death, meaninglessness, yada yada. After being pretty good about ignoring it for the last couple of weeks, I came close to totally losing my shit on tonight’s walk, and it was not at all fun. Ugh.

** Mine is the plain notebook, pocket size. I absolutely can’t stand writing on ruled paper. Gives me the ickies.

P. S. I did finish the paper, but not without a lot of unfocused staring into space and related time-wasters. It’s not pretty, but it’s done. I have an A in that class anyway—apparently the TA likes my writing.

As for the midterm, I spent all my time working on the paper and still haven’t cracked the book for the other course (nor have I, um, gone to any classes at all since the last test). I got a 70. The class average was 63, and my score put me in the 67th percentile. My 72 on the first test turned into a B with the curve, so I’ll have to ace the final (worth 50%) if I want a decent grade in this class.

(I have 56 minutes of power left on my laptop, which should be plenty of time…)

My real blogiversary was just over a week ago (January 27). I’d planned to write about it then, but that damn washing machine had to go and steal my thunder by eating my pants.

Anyway, I should write this now before it gets to be, like, April and borderline irrelevant. So, three years. Yup, it feels about that long. I don’t remember if I’ve mentioned this here before, but now that I’ve done it for a while, blogging seems like an integral part of my adult* life. While I can certainly still relate to the person I was four or five years ago through memories or sporadic paper-journal entries, there’s nothing like a catalogue of daily rants to really let me back into my own head.

Because that’s what this is about, really. Me me me me me. If you’re reading this, and you’re *not* me, then of course I’m glad you’re here, and you’re welcome to stay as long as you’d like and maybe chat a bit, but in the long run I’m doing this for myself. Life is so short, and memory is so untrustworthy, that I don’t want to forget even a tiny part of where I’ve gone, what I’ve done, or who I’ve been. If I could videotape my life (without interfering in it) I would, but blogging is a close second**.

(32 minutes)

On the other hand, I don’t want to dismiss the social benefits of blogging entirely. The connections I’ve made with people online have been a happy side effect of this me-centered endeavor. It takes forEVER to develop meaningful friendships in the real world (at least for a social klutz like me), and I feel that people are so often fakey-faketastic in person that it’s nearly impossible to figure out who a person really is without a lot of time and effort. I don’t think the fakeness is intentional in most cases, but that it’s forced on us by awkward social situations***.

(18 minutes)

On the interweb, I can usually figure out within a few minutes whether I’d like to get know a particular person better or not. They seem intelligent and reasonable? Great, I can read their archives. Uninteresting, shallow, psychotic, and/or illiterate? I can move on to something else and no one will be the wiser—no awkward glances as we pass in the hall, no “why don’t you call me anymore” emails. Low-risk.

Ok, now my computer is starting to get whiny about its powerlessness (8 minutes), so I’ll stop here. I might finish this later. Ok, I’m back. Woo AC power.

So where was I? Ah yes, online social interactions carry little risk. It would be nice if they were also highly rewarding. And sometimes they are, or at least they have the potential to be. Right now I spend most of my spare time on the interweb, but all I do is read, read, read. Which isn’t terrible, by a long shot…but it’s lazy.

I know there’s a point in here somewhere, swirling around in my head. It needs fleshing out, which I suppose is what I’m supposed to do before I turn on the computer and type away. But right now I’m sleepy—Sammy’s been bad all day today, starting at midnight. So it’s naptime, or booktime, or layaroundtime. Sundaytime.

———
* “adult”

** Besides, even if I did have all that footage, I’d have to edit it if I ever wanted to watch it, and *that* sounds like a project that would get buried under piles of crap thisfast.

*** Not that this is necessarily a bad thing. If the person taking my order at Starbucks is having a bad day, or hates his job, or is on a personal crusade of some sort, I don’t need to hear about it right then. We can both be fakey-fakey, and nobody will be the worse for it.

As much as I moan and complain about the piddly aggravations in my relatively cushy life, I have to say that 2005 has been pretty damn good to me. Compared to the mess that was 2004, 2005 kicked serious annual ass.

In my last “Year in Review,” I christened 2005 “A Year of Transition and Transformation,” which turned out to be more or less spot-on. I’m not going to sit here and tell you that in the space of twelve months I’ve become “a whole new person” or some crap like that, but it has certainly been the most changing-est year of my short life**.

Since I spent most of the time “on leave” from Mudd and/or half-ass enrolled at HBU, there hasn’t been much book-learning. Life-lessons, on the other hand, have been coming hard and fast, the most important such revelation being that *there is a world outside of Harvey Mudd College*. There’s even a world outside of math and physics, believe it or not—a world in which people work and eat and shop and travel and do things besides homework. A world in which stress and sleep dep are not badges of honor, but rather reasons to seek medical help. A world in which I want to shove hot pokers through my eyes fewer days than not.

I want to make very clear that I’m not dissing Mudd, or math, or Mudders, or physicists, or sleep-deprived people. You know I love you guys, and I have tons of respect for Mudd and everyone who sticks it out. It’s just not the life for me—a fact which I was at best unsure of and at worst completely oblivious to at the end of 2004. I used to be terrified of the real world, but now…eh, it’s not so bad.

This year has been all about work, friends, teaching, blogging, puppies, living on my own, and frappuccinos. Oh god, the frappuccinos. Every time I start to get sick of all the frozen calories, they come out with a new flavor. Sneaky bastards.

So, for your digestive* pleasure, I will now proceed to recite the major events of the past year (in historical present tense, for added intensity!) in list form.

January: I have recently taken a leave of absence from Mudd and am living with my parents. Before I start looking for a part-time job to supplement my tutoring, I call the tutoring folks to see if they have any work for me. Lo and behold, there’s an open part-time position in the office. Huzzah! I begin work on MLK Day (one year ago today). I attend my first wedding as a grown-up. I discover the yumminess that is Project Runway. I sign a lease on an apartment in town, five minutes from the office (instead of over an hour with traffic). I begin teaching my first SAT class, though I was never trained as a teacher.

February: I move into my apartment. TVMax doesn’t hook up my internet connection for five. long. weeks. I still love my new job to bits. My brother is accepted to Vanderbilt.

March: I meet Wendy—what’s this now? A real-life, honest-to-goodness classicist? Be still my heart. My washing machine floods the kitchen. I try to cook things.

April: I try out for Jeopardy! but don’t make the cut. Sigh. Wait for me, Alex…I’ll make it to Culver City someday. I file a tax return for the first time. I register for fall semester at Mudd. I see Andre Agassi play in person. The “spring test season” makes it hella busy at work. Millie, the Jack Russell Terrier whose perkiness knows no bounds, spends her first weekend at Camp Natalie.

May: Coworkers discover my blog and create their own blog ‘rating’ it. Theirs goes dead after two weeks. Turns out blogging is harder than it looks. *smirk* Also, could I be any busier? Still loving it, though. When my car dies as I’m leaving to teach a class, I borrow Toni’s truck and immediately drive it into a pole. Expensive, but comedy gold. My brother graduates from high school.

June: I lose my cell phone for a couple days, and it is INCONVENIENT. I take my first vacation from work, during which I accompany my brother’s Quiz Bowl team to the national championship in Chicago as a pseudo-adviser, then visit my cousin at his hotel internship in Minneapolis. This is my first ever trip to the Midwest; I cross four more states (IL, WI, MN, and IA) off the to-visit list. I unplug my television. It’s been 200 days since then, and I’ve never once regretted it. I start taking Zoloft***.

July: I purchase my very own domain (yes, this one right here), but don’t do much with it for a while. I turn 21. Half-Blood Prince. Mood swings like whoa, especially as I consider whether or not to return to Mudd in the fall.

August: I make up my mind to stay in Houston, though not without a metric shit-ton of angst. I spend a lot of time lying on the floor, trying to block out the world. I add a little Wellbutrin to the mix. I take on yet another part-time job as a question writer. My brother goes off to college. Katrina sends a good portion of New Orleans our way.

September: Prepoceros is officially up and running. I enroll as a transient student at HBU just for the heck of it. That 8am Modern China class? Kicking my ass. Rita comes roaring in to an anticlimax, with the threat of wind causing more damage (snarled traffic, stranded motorists, gas shortages, looting) than the wind itself. Made for some damn fun blogging, though.

October: The mood swings are still going strong. I still suck at school. I can’t stand the Wellbutrin, so I stop taking it*^. I begin teaching LSAT, again with no real training. As a result, my first class sucks balls^.

November: My first attempt at NaNoWriMo tanks almost immediately. Prop 2: marriage now unquestionably exclusive; Texas 1, homos 0. A bummer, but not unexpected. I realize that the thought of going back to California in the spring upsets me, so I apply to UH. As a Classics major. GRE.

December: Puppy! Samson comes home and does a superb job of being adorable and cuddly. I am accepted to UH and officially transfer out of Mudd—this should be shocking and disconcerting, as it goes against any plan I’ve ever had for my life, but I’m surprisingly ok with it, which leads me to believe I made the right decision. Time will tell. Sam gets sick, then better again. Sam meets Fez: instant BFFs. New Year’s Eve at the beach.

So there you have it: transition, transformation, the whole shebang. I’m happy with where I am right now. I’m glad to be in Houston, I like my job, I love my friends, I can’t get enough of my puppy, and I’m satisfied with the direction my life is heading. Things don’t look nearly as dismal as they did twelve months ago.

It’s a little odd, though, that both last year and the year before I’ve made Major Life Changes™ near the end of the year. It’s probably just coincidence, but who knows where I’ll find myself in November 2006? A convent? Jail? Canada?

As for the coming year, I haven’t made any specific resolutions yet, but I feel the theme should be something along the lines of 2006: Settling In and Taking Control. This is a different life than I’ve been accustomed to: living in Houston as a full-time student with a part-time job, majoring in humanities, for chrissakes. I’ve had a while to play around and experiment with things in 2005 when most of my life was in flux, but now that I’m heading in a solid direction, it’s time for me to grab this new life of mine by the horns and make it truly my own. Focus. Commitment. Courage.

Okay, maybe ‘courage’ is a bit over-the-top, but you get the idea. My life. Mine mine mine. Time to start getting things done around here.

Bring it, ’06.

———
* As in Reader’s Digest, silly. Don’t eat Prepoceros.

** This does not include 1984 (or 1983, depending on how you count it), in which I went from not-existing to existing. Hard to beat that.

*** Did I mention that I’d been mopey, disconnected, anxious, and unmotivated for the better part of the year, and that I’d been in therapy for several weeks at this point? I don’t remember exactly when I started going, and I’m too lazy to look it up. I’ve quit now—both the therapy and the medication—but I don’t remember when that happened, either. October, I guess.

*^ I neglected to inform my psychiatrist of this fact, however, so now I have lots of extra pills. It would be so wasteful to throw them all away…. Kidding. Sort of.

^ I’m teaching my second LSAT class right now, and it’s actually going rather well. Phew! Still feel bad about the first one, though. [Edit: I should not blame this on my lack of training---it makes it sound like work doesn't give two shits about me or their students. It was mostly my inexperience and lack of familiarity with the lesson book, and I did agree to teach the class, after all.]