Photo Weeks #51 & #52 - and Some 2018 Reflections

Happy New Year’s Eve! This year I am spending New Year’s Eve at home, and there’s maybe a 20% chance that I will actually fall asleep before midnight. Oh well. 2019 will come whether or not I’m awake enough to greet it.

Last week, week 51, I hosted the annual Christmas party and white elephant gift exchange for my old high school friends. Even in years where we don’t see each other that often, I can always count on making a full effort to see each other during the winter holidays and during July Fourth. (It seems like we’re the only friend group that really makes a big deal for July Fourth…) We used James’ present, a set of camera lenses, to take these cute photos. Aren’t we adorable?

Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and the Day After Christmas (I guess Boxing Day is it’s actual title) was spent at home, surrounded by food, Super Smash Bros Ultimate, and more food. I’ve come to realize that I am not a very sentimental person about traditions, but I do like food traditions, like hot pot on Christmas Eve. Mmm. I also spent the days reading through Molly Yeh’s cookbook Molly On the Range, as mentioned in my last post, and this past week I decided to make scallion pancake challah!

This was my first time making bread (besides banana and persimmon bread, which don’t involve yeast and rising time and I think should just be called breakfast cake) and it was more fun and turned out better than I expected!

Besides spending a lot of time with friends and family, the last two weeks of this year were pretty uneventful. I purposely did nothing during week 52, including writing the Photo Week 51 post, because I wanted to decompress from the hectic-ness of final projects and relax in knowing I no longer had a Friday 7-10pm class. I got antsy about my lack of productivity by the end of the week, though – hence the bread baking. This year, I still don’t feel like I accomplished anything. But maybe I am too hard on myself. After all I did finish another year of school and am one semester away from getting my MA. I decorated my house more and feel more confident in my cooking and baking skills. (Although I always feel like I am just enforcing stereotypes more when I work on my domestic skills…) I traveled internationally. I got engaged, for goodness sakes. (Although is that really an accomplishment or just something that happened to me? Again with the stereotypes! Do you tell a woman congratulations for getting engaged like that’s a status that she has been working for her whole life? I guess people generally intend their congratulations for both parties involved… I hope.)

But maybe the reason I don’t feel like I’ve accomplished anything is because despite all these fun and great things that I’ve done this past year, I don’t think I’ve gotten any closer to where I want to be. And that’s mostly because I have no idea where I want to be. It’s been five years since I’ve graduated college, and even when I graduated I only had a vague idea of what I wanted to do with my future. I probably just thought, optimistically, that I would figure it out as I went along. Figuring it out as I go along has so far turned out to be a lot more heartache and headache than I anticipated. I’m definitely not where I hoped to be five years ago (I wouldn’t even have imagined this is where I would be) and it seems stupid to want to try and plan where I’ll be five years from here. And yet it does seem wise to want to do a little bit of planning…

So my hope for 2019 is that by the end of it I will feel a little more comfortable about the space I am occupying in this world and my goal for 2019 is to take steps to figure out what kind of space that is. I’ve wasted too much time in 2018 and in the last few years being unhappy and I know it sounds cliché but that is what I really, really want in 2019 – to not just be happy but to be content with who I am and where I am in life. This is probably a lifelong pursuit, but at least I can try and take a few steps forward this upcoming year!

Happy New Years, everyone.