I'm bored and sometimes when I'm bored I do memes. Like this one I discovered today, which is pretty simple: you write a sentence for each year of your life. It can sum up the whole year, or a single notable event remembered from that year or whatever. Pointless, as most memes are, but it's 11:00 on a Sunday night and if the news and weather channel are to be believed the town is about to freeze over for the next couple of days so I don't think anyone is going out tonight after all (we initially had these big grad student reunion plans since we haven't all been together for five weeks, but I don't think Richie's plane ended up getting in on time and it's freezing so people are being homebodies, I guess). Speaking of the weather, I'm tired of everyone acting like the world is going to end just because there might possibly, POSSIBLY be an ice storm tomorrow. Debbie was making me laugh talking about how when she was out earlier people were storming the HEB and clearing the shelves of bottled water and canned goods as if we're going to be snowed in for weeks and weeks and not, like, hours. It is Texas. It is not North Dakota. People are idiots.
Anyway, here goes the meme (And I'm starting with zero rather than one because...well, that makes sense to me. One implies the year I was one year old, zero would be the year I was actually born, understand? Yeah, okay, cool.)
0. I was supposed to be born on Thanksgiving but instead opted to make an early arrival on November 5th at the county hospital in El Paso.
1. According to my mother I spent a lot of time shredding up books when I was supposed to be taking afternoon naps, so I suppose it's kind of surprising I grew up to be such a voracious reader.
2. My sister Chelsea was born and meanwhile I wandered around looking pretty pathetic with an eye patch and a teeny tiny pair of glasses before I finally had surgery to correct my lazy eye (and thank god my parents agreed to let me be operated on that young because I'm not kidding when I say there is no doubt in my mind I'd be a very, VERY different person today had I been forced to grow up cross-eyed...I wish I was being facetious, but kids are mean and guys are shallow and I'm so, so glad that little problem of mine was fixed before I was old enough for it to matter).
3. I started preschool at St. Andrew's, where I immediately befriended a girl named Melissa and was so enamored of her that I named my stuffed cat in her honor.
4. We moved from my first home to the house in El Paso where my parents still live, and my brother Shane was born two weeks later.
5. In October I skipped a week of kindergarten and went to Disney World and a Florida beach with my family and grandparents, the first vacation I remember in pretty good detail.
6. I realized that my mother was the tooth fairy and simultaneously confirmed my long-standing suspicion that my parents were also Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.
7. By night I was going through a period of intense insomnia and by day I was busy constantly pretending I was sick and leaving my first grade classroom to hide out in the nurse's office because I was so freakin' sensitive that just watching my classmates fight/get in trouble made me a nervous wreck.
8. My best friend Shanna and I were very into Nintendo and Sega, building elaborate sand towns in her backyard, coloring stickers, and that TV show Dinosaurs.
9. I sat next to a boy named Danny in my third grade class and he spent a lot of time making me laugh, which meant we spent a lot of time getting scolded, but it turned out that wasn't such a big deal, which made me realize that a person can actually speak in school, and that realization pretty much changed my life.
10. Over spring break we drove thirteen hours to Telluride, Colorado for a skiing trip, at the time the longest car trip I'd ever made in my life (and still one of the longest).
11. A boy in my 5th grade class became slightly obsessed with me and freaked me (and my father) out one night by showing up on the front porch on his bicycle at 11 PM to give me a stuffed teddy bear.
12. I played a starring role in our sixth grade play about Africa, the event that I pinpoint as the moment in life that I decided I wanted a career in theatre.
13. I grew four inches in one summer and finally started my period a month before my 14th birthday and what felt like years after all the other girls I knew.
14. For Christmas my grandma surprised my family by telling us that come June we'd be spending two weeks in Europe, and the trip through the Netherlands, France, Germany, and Switzerland was the most exciting thing I'd done in my life up to that point, as far as I was concerned.
15. I wasted tons and tons of time with my girl friends (one of them was Melissa, who I re-met in middle school) giggling and whispering about this group of boys we thought were so fine (incidentally, said guys grew up to be somewhat disappointing on the whole).
16. I went to Europe again over the summer, this time minus parents plus my high school High-Q team, and I realize this sounds incredibly nerdy but it was actually tons of fun and we saw beautiful places and amazing things and I think it was the first time I really drank without parental permission/supervision.
17. I got really involved in high school theatre, finally learned how to flirt, had my first relationship (a summer fling, basically), had my first real, meaningful kiss while in that relationship, and then eventually began dating Mike a few weeks before my eighteenth birthday (even in retrospect, seventeen was a great year).
18. I fell in love with Mike (and, because I am the ultimate cliche, we gave up--not lost, quite willingly gave up-- our virginity in a hotel room immediately following our senior prom).
19. I began spending a lot of time with Kymberli, Katy, Meg, Jenny, and Holly, I discovered the wild world of the college theatre party, and I stopped moping so much about my boyfriend back home and began to see the full potential of college and life in Fort Worth.
20. Mike and I started having some problems with our committed long distance relationship and he decided we should "see other people", at which point I proceeded to do exactly that and thus my 20th year was fantastically wild and I spent quite a bit of time doing many of the things I personally feel one needs to do as a young single woman so that when you're 52 and married you have absolutely no reason to look back on your life and go, "Wow, I wish I'd tried [blank] when I was single" because, hey, you DID do it when you were single and now it's out of your system, thank god!
21. My not-really-ever-a-relationship-but-definitely-something with College Ex was at its peak and I was having a great time since I felt sexy all the time and never had to deal with real relationship stuff, I became a regular at the Pub, I directed for the first time and fell in love with it, and I got to spend a month living in London with a bunch of my closest friends and the guy I was sleeping with, so it was basically the best study abroad trip imaginable (in retrospect, 21 was also a really great year).
22. I phoned in my last semester of college while spending more time hanging out and partying with my friends than I actually did working, I somehow still graduated summa cum laude from college, and then I moved to my current home to start my masters program, which was overwhelming and a bit lonely at first.
23. I came into my stride in my masters program, had a lot of academic successes, and made a bunch of great friends, while meanwhile my love life totally went to hell (but I did get to live in England again for a while!).
24. We'll see...
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