The reason why it’s such a huge file is so that I won’t forget. Hello, 2010. Very glad you could finally grace us with your presence, seeing as 2009 absolutely sucked.
Now that I think about it, though, I have no idea why I thought that 2009 was a suckfest. Nothing really drastic happened to me (except for our dog dying) and to be quite honest, 2009 had a lot of milestones for me, in terms of personal goals and markers. I guess the stress just kept on piling up, and there was collective unrest perpetually present in everyone I’ve spoken to. In the last few months of 2009, people were practically begging the days to go by faster so that they could start over. Like the coming of the new year meant that the sucky cards they were dealt with would automatically change to absolutely fantastic ones.
All in all, I think I actually kind of liked 2009 because that was when I came to terms with who I was. I became less pretentious and more comfortable with myself, which is a little funny because someone called me out for being pretentious. But I digress.
I’m not going to do those year-end posts, where people list their favorite records or favorite films, because I have a knack of getting into things late, and also of forgetting things. I guess I am lucky that Last.fm keeps track of my listening habits. Here are the people I most listened to in 2009:
- Pavement
- Animal Collective
- The National
- Vampire Weekend
- Elliott Smith
- Voxtrot
- Mark Mothersbaugh
- Brand New
- Bob Dylan
- Okkervil River
The films that stuck out were Adventureland, Up, (500) Days of Summer, Inglourious Basterds, Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Watchmen and Paper Heart. My favorite books were John Green’s “Looking for Alaska” and “An Abundance of Katherines,” Dave Eggers’ “The Wild Things,” Margaret Atwood’s “The Penelopiad,” David Levithan’s “The Realm of Possibility” and Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s “Galápagos,” “Slaughterhouse-Five,” and “Cat’s Cradle.”
I know that doesn’t say much about what my year has been like, but it’s nice to go back and try to remember. 2009 sucked, on the whole, but I think I don’t feel its suckage as much (as I did at the time these things happened), because there was a fair amount of growing up involved on my part.
And all I can really do in 2010 is to try to be better, and that is, I think, the most I can really hope for.