2008-2009 in Review

I sometimes think that I'm too nostalgic for my own good. It's hard not to be, with the past year's worth of my life packed away in boxes around me, and the aroma of summer wafting in through the windows. I figured I'd give my nostalgia a break today and let it take over as I take the past 12 months into consideration.

Freshman year was not exactly the time of my life. After suffering through a depressing fall semester (let's just say the football team was the least of my worries) and a taxing second semester (20 units, 16 of them technical), I was just about done with life at this point last year. Summer vacation couldn't have been any more welcome.

My self-confidence looking much like an all too enterprising, yet not astute enough forest critter in the middle of an interstate, I set off with my family on a 3 week vacation to the Philippines to recollect. Somewhere between traversing the beautiful scenery, reconnecting with family I hadn't seen in 8 years, and taking care of a days-old puppy, I began to realize "Hey, maybe my life's not complete shit after all". I definitely flew those 10,000 miles back with a slightly bigger smile on my face.

With this renewed sense of self, I went back to Berkeley to hit summer sessions hard. The first thing I did was define a set of goals to reach by the end of the year (which might be a subject for a future blog post =D). I then resolved to never again be lazy in my life. I realized that being lazy meant I had one excuse or another not to do something; therefore, I figured out that to be productive, I had to eliminate all excuses against its accomplishment. Yay outsmarting myself!

During the Fall, the challenge was a little different. It was more about gaining better confidence in the things I have to say. The process started at TA-OP and E190, when I realized that, hell, even I had things that people were interested in listening to (who would have thought a compulsory writing class would be so influential to me?). But throughout the year, I began to be less and less concerned about how stupid or how dumb the things I said were, and more about what saying such things did. This even spilled over in my socializing, as I began to get to know more people through an increased confidence in just striking up conversation (yes, I have poor social skills I know, but that is a story for another day).

This past spring semester was kind of a weird mix of things. On the one hand, it is the hardest I ever worked in my life (400 hours of CS150 are you kidding me? vs. 1 all nighter a week the semester previous). On the other, it was a lot about polishing up the social end of things. Throughout the semester, I made new friends in places I had never looked before, and got to know the ones I already had better (PR-COMM 09 ALL THE TIME!). My social skills are definitely better for the effort I've been putting into refining them; having a certain someone reprimand me for slipups certainly helped too(you know who you are =P. I really mean it in all honesty btw). Despite the fact that I probably put in much more time to school than to just hanging with people this semester, I definitely think the social end of things had more impact on me.

It seems to me that every year, there's sort of a theme to the things I improve about myself. This year, it was confidence. Confidence in the things I had to do. Confidence about my relationships to other people. Confidence in my own value. I definitely think I am a much better person than I was a year ago. I talk to people differently. I walk around campus differently. Hell, I even smile in photographs differently. I feel so much more alive than I did a year ago and I don't want to go back. Who knows what next year's theme will be: all I know is, like this year, I should take it one step at a time.

No Regrets