Babylon, ya thunder.
YEAR-IN-REVIEW ROUNDUP
The 2015 Highlight Reel, Italics Edition
Oh boy. Here goes.
January: T ruminates on some of the difficult things he will have to do while home, finds solace in books, then, as he attempts to rebuild a bridge burnt, returns to Paris after its first terrorist attack of the year.
February: T frackin' loves the BSG pilot, becomes accustomed to Paris, gets emotional while watching Big Hero 6, listens to some live gospel, and continues to be impressed by BSG.
March: T does very black things, and watches two beautiful black girls sing. (A ton of Link Salad this month.)
April: T finishes his first novel of the year, and suffers the death of a very good friend.
May: T is chased by pleasant thoughts, and has a quietly perfect day. Then he graduates from law school.
June: T marvels at the audacity of SCOTUS. (I believe he was also studying for the Bar Exam this month.)
July: T tries to learn life lessons from DFW, but still gets his ass whupped by Bar Prep,
August: T is enamored of the sad-com, "celebrates" his first decade of LJ, but is beginning to get grumpy about books.
September: T worries about his writing, discovers his new hood, and begins his work in civil rights.
October: T finishes Infinite Jest, grieves, and has a very surreal night involving a cousin and an elected official. This month, T also finished his second novel of the year and gets some really bad news.
November: T accomplishes the NaNoWriMo hat-trick, writes about Laquan McDonald and atrocity porn, and makes a big step towards something previously thought impossible.
December: T writes his third novel of the year, starts to get re-fucked by Bar Prep, breaks 1000 pages of new fiction for the year, finishes his screenplay, and begins to grow his wings.
One view of the year would position it in trimesters, the first being the tail end of my sojourn in Paris, the second being the odious crucible that was Bar Prep, then the final trimester concerning my move to New York and the adult-ing that attended it. But the threads connecting all three are stronger than they perhaps were last year, where my summer months as a Big Law associate was their complete cessation and break with the transformation I endured in Paris, finding the stole of activist suddenly fitted to my shoulders. No, this calendar year saw a bit more settling. My role in Paris continued along those lines, and as my departure date neared, the city began to unfurl its most charming self. Much of what burdened me towards the end of last year had fallen away, and now unburdened, I found myself flying into fortunate encounter after fortunate encounter. I spent significantly more time in The Rooms and, perhaps made possible by the spiritual scrubbing away of grime, discovered that amorous endeavors need not be colored by intensity and fury, that they need not attempt to break records each time going from 0 to 60, that they do not need to be rushed into, that they can be characterized more by grazing and lightness of foot and insouciance and that permanence, rather than a thing after which to be quested, can evanesce as a worry, no longer casting a shadow over the whole enterprise. That we knew my departure was imminent only helped us enjoy time together all the more. Perhaps this a longwinded way of saying that the first third of 2015 was a confidence-booster.
The summer was a morass, as can be expected. Not exactly pregnant with the types of events ripe for rumination on this forum. Much more the type of episode to be documented and lamented about on Facebook, with the quite (in)famous #SlouchingTowardsEsquire hashtag. Perhaps the most striking bit of this summer was how much of the outside world made it onto my Newsfeed and how little of it leaked here, a gulf that was very much bridged in the final third of this year. Which makes the whole year seem more like an evolution of sorts than a thing of clearly demarcated chunks.
There were certain things I learned to love over the course of the year, learned to value and cherish and champion, and that see me where I am now, seeing a pretty dope person in a way that seems very much a triumph over previous difficulties, obstacles formerly thought insurmountable.
To trace the architecture of personal growth is to discover that, sometimes, the growing thing is less a bit of flora or fauna sprouting sui generis out of the ground and more the coming together of disparate pieces floating in the ether. My understanding of so many things hearkens back, for instance, to reading the Jenny Casey novels and having the fortune to, over the course of several years, count their author among my coolest of friends, growing up in a house surrounded by the women and girls that filled it, the ways in which the world invaded my law school experience, all of which have come together, gathering other pieces attached to the ends of their tendrils, to come together and form this thing now to which some people come for learning and who has finally learned to see and appreciate the beautiful, beautiful shades before, around, and atop him.
I thought with all the novel-writing that happened this year, I'd have thrown my arm out, but it appears that the urge to scribble and to pontificate and to go on at length has yet to leave me.
I'll not complain.
The 2015 Highlight Reel, Italics Edition
Oh boy. Here goes.
January: T ruminates on some of the difficult things he will have to do while home, finds solace in books, then, as he attempts to rebuild a bridge burnt, returns to Paris after its first terrorist attack of the year.
February: T frackin' loves the BSG pilot, becomes accustomed to Paris, gets emotional while watching Big Hero 6, listens to some live gospel, and continues to be impressed by BSG.
March: T does very black things, and watches two beautiful black girls sing. (A ton of Link Salad this month.)
April: T finishes his first novel of the year, and suffers the death of a very good friend.
May: T is chased by pleasant thoughts, and has a quietly perfect day. Then he graduates from law school.
June: T marvels at the audacity of SCOTUS. (I believe he was also studying for the Bar Exam this month.)
July: T tries to learn life lessons from DFW, but still gets his ass whupped by Bar Prep,
August: T is enamored of the sad-com, "celebrates" his first decade of LJ, but is beginning to get grumpy about books.
September: T worries about his writing, discovers his new hood, and begins his work in civil rights.
October: T finishes Infinite Jest, grieves, and has a very surreal night involving a cousin and an elected official. This month, T also finished his second novel of the year and gets some really bad news.
November: T accomplishes the NaNoWriMo hat-trick, writes about Laquan McDonald and atrocity porn, and makes a big step towards something previously thought impossible.
December: T writes his third novel of the year, starts to get re-fucked by Bar Prep, breaks 1000 pages of new fiction for the year, finishes his screenplay, and begins to grow his wings.
One view of the year would position it in trimesters, the first being the tail end of my sojourn in Paris, the second being the odious crucible that was Bar Prep, then the final trimester concerning my move to New York and the adult-ing that attended it. But the threads connecting all three are stronger than they perhaps were last year, where my summer months as a Big Law associate was their complete cessation and break with the transformation I endured in Paris, finding the stole of activist suddenly fitted to my shoulders. No, this calendar year saw a bit more settling. My role in Paris continued along those lines, and as my departure date neared, the city began to unfurl its most charming self. Much of what burdened me towards the end of last year had fallen away, and now unburdened, I found myself flying into fortunate encounter after fortunate encounter. I spent significantly more time in The Rooms and, perhaps made possible by the spiritual scrubbing away of grime, discovered that amorous endeavors need not be colored by intensity and fury, that they need not attempt to break records each time going from 0 to 60, that they do not need to be rushed into, that they can be characterized more by grazing and lightness of foot and insouciance and that permanence, rather than a thing after which to be quested, can evanesce as a worry, no longer casting a shadow over the whole enterprise. That we knew my departure was imminent only helped us enjoy time together all the more. Perhaps this a longwinded way of saying that the first third of 2015 was a confidence-booster.
The summer was a morass, as can be expected. Not exactly pregnant with the types of events ripe for rumination on this forum. Much more the type of episode to be documented and lamented about on Facebook, with the quite (in)famous #SlouchingTowardsEsquire hashtag. Perhaps the most striking bit of this summer was how much of the outside world made it onto my Newsfeed and how little of it leaked here, a gulf that was very much bridged in the final third of this year. Which makes the whole year seem more like an evolution of sorts than a thing of clearly demarcated chunks.
There were certain things I learned to love over the course of the year, learned to value and cherish and champion, and that see me where I am now, seeing a pretty dope person in a way that seems very much a triumph over previous difficulties, obstacles formerly thought insurmountable.
To trace the architecture of personal growth is to discover that, sometimes, the growing thing is less a bit of flora or fauna sprouting sui generis out of the ground and more the coming together of disparate pieces floating in the ether. My understanding of so many things hearkens back, for instance, to reading the Jenny Casey novels and having the fortune to, over the course of several years, count their author among my coolest of friends, growing up in a house surrounded by the women and girls that filled it, the ways in which the world invaded my law school experience, all of which have come together, gathering other pieces attached to the ends of their tendrils, to come together and form this thing now to which some people come for learning and who has finally learned to see and appreciate the beautiful, beautiful shades before, around, and atop him.
I thought with all the novel-writing that happened this year, I'd have thrown my arm out, but it appears that the urge to scribble and to pontificate and to go on at length has yet to leave me.
I'll not complain.