2024: Year in Review

Foreword

I’m wrestling with traditions. Rituals. Marking the time as it goes by with more than the weekday-weekend split, more than simply naming the days by their slot in the seven-day cycle and their appointed month and number.

For years, I had church and family traditions to give shape and meaning to the seasons. Candlelight services on Christmas Eve, family lunches at my mother’s family’s houses on Thanksgiving and Christmas, Lenten sacrifices, Easter sunrise services.

Those have all fallen away with time and geographic distance. Alex’s and my family have scattered across the country from Alaskan islands to South Carolina pinelands, from hip college towns in California to forested suburbs in Missouri, and even the 100 miles between Philadelphia and Baltimore is increasingly a distance I am reluctant to cross.

How to commit any given holiday to one part of the clan or the other? Each holiday we spend with my father is a time zone away from a holiday we could spend with Alex’s father.

And what of the meaning religion gives to certain days of the year? Christmas once held sacred importance, but now I struggle to track whether the solstice is on the 21^st or 22^nd, and Alex and I have only successfully observed a candlelit vigil of winter thankfulness once in 2020, when the option of travel and family communion was moot. It was a good one, though, one I always consider reviving. Alas, not in 2024, the solstice has passed, and I’m still not sure whether it was the 21^st or 22^nd.

New Year’s seems like a natural inflection point. A time ripe for reflection, to look back and look forward like the two-faced Roman god Janus who inspired our month January’s name.

And yet. Like every other holiday, I struggle to consistently do anything about it. Lots of folks make resolutions, and I reckon a few even manage to keep them through February. But I find myself so caught up in the business of living, keeping up with the ceaseless flow of the present into the future, that I struggle to pull up and think about any significant length of time. Alex and I have successfully instituted a weekly routine of Saturday morning dates where we talk deeply, but the forest of a year is quickly lost in the trees of each week.

A cursory thought: 2024 was a pretty good year for me, overall! But then: well… the last few months have been, anyway. Come to think of it, January 2024 was a low point for me. I had almost forgotten the tumultuous 23-24 school year takes up almost half of this calendar year. See how easy it is to forget?

As Alex writes media reviews, people post their Spotify Unwrapped lists, bookish folks analyze their reading logs, I’m left wondering what artifacts I have to ponder to try to savor the fleeting time we have here. I’m caught between the opposing pressures to experience more with my limited time and to experience deeply. I’m slightly envious of the people who like to journal, to track, to scrapbook, to commemorate and make an activity of reflection. I do it for work. I’m a meticulous keeper of the details my students share with me, and my weekly reports are considered literary nonfiction. We are required to evaluate performance twice a school year, and the summer is almost entirely dedicated to reflection. And I like it. I excel at acting effectively and intentionally, and the nature of working in a school gives such a natural rhythm to the year- hit the ground running in the fall, maintain the marathon best you can in the winter, celebrate and transition in the spring, and reflect and renew in the summer.

But what of my life outside of work? Is it not worth documenting, narrating, celebrating, and renewing as well?

So, here I am. Let’s look back and look forward.

2024: A Year in Review

The most obvious thing I could do here (in my mind) is go month by month through my Google Photos and glean as much of my life from that as I can. However, I’m liking the idea of dividing this exercise into domains of my life more than months of the year. After all, the point of this is not just to rehash the chronology of the last 365 days but rather to give meaning to that time.

A Year as an Advisor

The calendar year of 2024 is the first full year I’ve spent in my position with 12 Plus (we have a new website, by the way, in case you’re wondering what my job is all about). It started out low, with conflict and a lot of self-doubt. However, this was all between adults, and my real stakeholders- the students- were the light and reason for enduring. Returning for a second school year has been a joy, though not without its challenges- budget cuts resulted in my team being reduced from three to one. Me. I’m the one.

This changes the nature of my job quite a bit. Instead of a planner who leads, coordinates, and mentors two young adults to do the bulk of the direct service, I am the direct service. And the planner and coordinator. I spent the summer planning workshops instead of developing them during the year like last year when I could spitball with another team member and have her create the materials we planned together. I’m in the students’ classes every week and they are in my room every day. I am their one and only go-to about their plans after high school, applying to college and trade school, taking the SAT, picking a major, choosing a career path, or just a safe space to go to when in need of a vent about an English essay or the drama of the student council elections. No, I am not the school counselor, but I am more easily found, and college & career readiness (my official area of expertise) often bleeds into reflections on what’s important to them and what they’ve experienced in life so far. There’s a lot of overlap.

My supervisor visits me every Tuesday afternoon and sees the students flock to my room at lunch to give me updates on the colleges they’ve applied to, requests for me to read their application essays, and just to knock out some schoolwork in the peace of my Center instead of the chaos of the cafeteria. Recently, she sent me a message after her visit: “It’s clear how much the students love and trust you. Thank you for all your work you do for the students and this school.”

Yeah, I like my new gig.

Family and Friends, Human and Nonhuman Alike

Wah, I’m Lisa and what artifacts do I have to ponder?

Cat photos. The answer is cat photos.

This year was our sixth year with Hazel. Not a month went by without a Hazel picture, as represented by the following draft for a calendar.

I made some other animal friends, and Alex and I had a lot of good times. As this new school year started, our schedules have become a bit more independent of each other. However, we now have weekly Saturday dates, mostly to coffee shops but sometimes hiking or staying at home.

I also met Ramon, the newest addition to Alex’s family. This was the year I realized I was good with young children.

I have a lot of great memories (and text messages) with some of my dearest friends. I’ve decided New Year’s is a good time to reach out to people and celebrate how we shared the year together, not just write long blog posts about how I took a lot of pictures of my cat for Alex and my dad to read. Maybe that will become a yearly tradition as well.

Things Made

Last year, I got back into writing fanfiction and got more serious with it than ever before. This year was a continuation of that with the completion of three major stories, the draft of an additional major story that I’m in the process of editing and posting, and two series of drabbles.

This involvement in fanfiction and leaning into my creativity through fic writing has become very important to me. I’ve even joined a Vincent Valentine fan server where I have my own channel to promote my writing and have a little band of virtual friends who discuss my stories with me. Fandom is something I’ve wanted to participate in meaningfully since 2013 when the Superwholock craze was gripping Tumblr, but I always struggled to feel like I was making a mark. This year, I feel like I made a mark.

Estimated word count of my work written this year: 91,527 (for reference, The Scarlet Letter is 86,897. So, yeah. You could say I’m the Nathaniel Hawthorne of Final Fantasy VII fic.) This blog post adds another 2.5K.

I also made Aerith in Stardew Valley. Neat.

Things Consumed

I’m interested in getting into media tracking so that I can have my own little Spotify Unwrapped of books, movies, games, etc. I engaged in over the year. I think that could be a fun segment for next year when I have a better grasp of what the topic even would be. This year, the biggest media consumption has definitely been Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth, a huge game made huger by my reluctance to use maps and mission markers and by my penchant for wandering around aimlessly on all the fun vehicles they put in the game (including chocobos that can glide on Cosmo Canyon winds and ones that can shoot themselves up on jets of water in the outskirts of Nibelheim!).

I also really fell in love with this virtual card game called Queen’s Blood. Um… it’s also in Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth. So… yeah, I guess it’s just that one again.

This has also been an excellent year for cafes. I’m in my cafe era and thriving.

Blackberry Jawn from Char & Stave- the coffeeshop/whiskey bar that I've been wanting to try in Chestnut Hill for ages

Delicious Mediterranean food and housemade flavored lemonade from Malelani Cafe in Mt. Airy

Matcha tiramisu latte from Caphe Roasters in Kensington (the building the 12 Plus office is in- convenient and I get a discount!)

Oatmilk s'mores latte from Riverbend Roastery in Richmond, VA.

Places and Spaces

This was a great year for travel, too!

South Carolina three ways: alone in March to do a lot of hiking and exploring with my dad, with Alex for Thanksgiving and a bit of exploring, and then on a road trip with Claire for a lazier indoor stay (and an entire season of Great British Bake Off.)

Alaska! My most ambitious and distant domestic trip yet. Alex and I flew to Juneau, spent some time hiking and exploring there with one of her sisters and her partner, and then took a ferry to Hoonah to spend a lovely week with Alex’s other sister and her family. I loved it there, but Alex told me she won’t move there with me, sigh. The Hoonah School District was hiring a counselor, too…

I took a solo trip up to Lopez, Pennsylvania to stay in a pretty unique rental home I found on vrbo: a mobile home on the grounds of a quirky country winery. It had three bedrooms, but it was the cheapest thing around, so I had it alllll to myself, including the VHS collection. Man, I had forgotten how to operate a VCR and had to text Alex for how to rewind. How we stray from our roots. But the main attraction was not the cozy kitcsh of the trailer home but rather the majestic waterfalls and robust hiking of Ricketts Glen State Park. Gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous, my favorite PA State Park I’ve experienced so far, not that I’m really that experienced. I still sometimes mentally return there, walking through the loamy forest soil, weaving around natural rock formations in solitude.

What’s Next?

As mentioned earlier, I want to try some intentional media tracking. I’ve focused my leisure time to be split between less concurrent projects at a time, so perhaps that will help with savoring things at their conclusion. Dunno. I’ve tried book tracking before and I didn’t stick with it in favor of using that time for more reading. But the hosts and community for the podcast Reading Glasses makes it seem so satisfying. Plus, Alex’s media reviews are cool, and I am trying to take some more time to reflect, after all. I’m resolving to try it for a year and see how my next Year in Review shapes up. Cuz yes. I’m also aiming to do one of these again. Make the passing of time mean something. Maybe by this time next year I’ll be writing about what a folly this all was, but maybe that’s all part of the process.

I’m determined to keep writing fanfiction. I love Vincent Valentine and the whole cast of Final Fantasy VII and it’s a joy to bring them to life myself. It’s exciting to have the fandom community, too, and I adore that I have an online space where I bring something to the table after over a decade of looking wistfully in from the outside. Alex tells me my writing has improved by leaps and bounds in the last 22 months since I had her read my very first FF7 fanfic, and I take pride in honing this craft and creating beautiful things that I (and others) like to read. It’s fun to understand creative writing more and more from this process as well, and to be able to discuss it with students as I coach them on their personal statements.

Speaking of the students, this time next year, I hope to be talking about my third go-around at Hill-Freedman, though things are never certain until contract renewals in the spring. I’ve already started brainstorming ways to effectively use a team again (this solo endeavor is, perhaps, a temporary measure) and have a vision of building out underclassmen curriculum (starting in senior year is a little late for some folks!). I reckon I still have another 3-4 years at least before I can realize my current vision. Maybe more. Schools are uncertain places where your house of cards can come crashing down at a moment’s notice. Which actually has me wondering how long I’ll really stay in schools: what will develop first- my tolerance for things not going how I want them or my determination to be able to do things the way I want?

My boss wants me to think about my professional development outside of my current role- a lot of people in my position start thinking about grad school, especially for roles in nonprofit leadership, school counseling, etc. I’ve toyed with the idea, particularly as a way to work with individuals without the constraint of school politics by getting licensed to be a therapist, but ultimately, my biggest goals right now are enjoying the life I have and taking ownership over my outside-of-work time. For a lot of my life, I didn’t really have leisure or hobbies as I focused nearly exclusively on school, work, and responsibilities to others, but now I’m glorying in the ability to enjoy myself. If I started school, I would probably have to give up fanfiction, media consumption, or both, and I don’t want to give those up right now. My job is meaningful and challenging enough right now, and I’m loving the hell out of life, honestly.

Alex, Hazel, and I have a pretty good thing going right now, and I look forward to keeping on in 2025. We're planning on moving from our Brewerytown apartment to somewhere in the northwest now that we both work in that part of town, and I'm increasingly captivated by the verdant suburban-like suburbs and quaint main streets of Chestnut Hill and Mt. Airy and Alex explores the charm of East Falls and Germantown on her scooter and with her new band of friends she's met through work. We're also finally going to get serious about planning our wedding after almost two full years of engagement.

Onwards and hopefully upwards! May this quiet time nestled between two holidays give you a time to rest, reflect, renew, or whatever it is you want it to do. God willing, see you this time next year for a 2025 retrospective. Be well.