I'll do negatives ahead of positives so that I end this post feeling optimistic.
Negatives:
- My dog died in June, right as school ended, leading to the worst couple hours of my life, and beyond that a strong feeling that something is missing (although perhaps not as bad as I'd always imagined it would be - I read some scientific study that said that three months after a traumatic life event or death of a loved one, most people feel essentially the same from moment-to-moment). She was the dog I grew up with and, being an only child, my main companion around the house, so it was tough. Jimmy's bang on and reading what he wrote hit me hard.
- Still single, out of a mix of inertia and cowardice, and this is made worse by many of my closer friends being in relationships at the moment. Still romantically useless in general, though I am working on it. This seems to occupy more of my subconscious than I'd like to admit.
- Grandpa, who already had dementia and wasn't in a particularly great state, has gone quite downhill since I saw him in August. Broke his leg perhaps in September and he's since been forced to move out of the house and into a nursing home (or several nursing homes, the previous ones either too expensive or not good enough) and this has made his dementia much worse. All hope is not lost, but the idea of him being out of their house, which is sort of a second home for me, as well as the relative imminence of his death (he turns ninety in a month, so fair is fair) is a major downer. Whenever I talk about it with my parents too much (and my mom talks about it a lot as she and her brother figure out various logistics) I just end up feeling depressed for the rest of the night.
- School has not exactly been easy, and there have been a few brutal stretches particularly in the spring preparing for AP tests. Senior year has been better in that much of my work is towards going to college, which at least has a clear usefulness to my life.
- On the other hand, I didn't get into Columbia. I also didn't
not get into Columbia, but it's perversely horrible to see your friends (surprisingly few) accepted into great universities while I'm still in limbo till late March.
- Real Salt Lake didn't make the playoffs for the first time since I can remember, and my general interest in football has continued to gradually wane, though with Klopp at Liverpool things have improved somewhat.
- I still feel too addicted to the internet and computers in general. The way I spend my free time is, by default, browsing the web, even when there's nothing at all interesting going on, and it's not on. I go through spells of realizing this, and adjusting accordingly - like, you know, reading books! Watching films! - but I haven't managed to sustain any sort of change to my life. I'm also, still, a disorganized, messy fuck and both my bedroom and my desk are total disgraces. It doesn't bode well.
- This is added on at the end, I seemingly still take far too much of an interest in myself given the length of this. Jesus. Why would anyone read this?
Positives:
- The cats are still around. My parents are still around, and healthy. My grandmother on the other side was in poor health earlier in the year, and things were looking a bit grim even through the summer, but she's made a comeback and seems to be as healthy and positive as ever, which is really heartening and a nice counterbalance to my grandfather.
- I've traveled a lot within the U.S.: Austin, Portland, New York, and recently New England with Vermont being the highlight. I love to travel more than almost anything and these trips have definitely been high points of the year and important for my mental health. I also went to Portland and New York on my own, which was my first taste of real independence, and I didn't die, so that was nice.
- Related to the travel, my photography has kicked on nicely. It's remained, or perhaps become, my biggest passion in life, and I still really think I'm good at it, so it's quite fulfilling. I see myself as a photographer more than anything else these days, and a nice bonus is that other people seem to do the same. I'm just trying to accumulate a body of work at the moment, and I feel like what I need more than anything else is to just go to more different places to photograph, ideally outside this country. My beloved local film lab shut down in October but I've replaced it with
this, which is just as good and a lot funnier.
- Apart from the dog dying, my summer was quite excellent. We spent it in California with my grandparents (the dementia-ridden one included), which got quite claustrophobic at times, but that was offset by staying in just about the most beautiful place on Earth, and doing a fantastic internship in the Tenderloin working with homeless people and computers. That was enormously fulfilling for me, and exciting as well to go into San Francisco three days a week and take photos on my lunch break. I miss the summer.
- College applications are going fine, I'll probably get into somewhere nice.
- I am terrible at getting girlfriends but excellent at getting friends, many of them girls. I probably have more close friends than I did at the end of last year, and it really makes a difference. It makes school much better for one thing, and I am enjoying high school itself more than I ever have. A few years ago I saw myself as doomed to loneliness and it couldn't be further from the case now.
Overall: I wrote last year that 2014 set my life on a particular course, which was why it was so transformative and I rated it so highly. I'd say that 2015 has basically kept my life on that course. On the whole it's been good, often very good, if not life-changing. I think I'm enjoying my high school years as I should without degenerating into some lad wanker. 8/10
Originally Posted by Spoonsky
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