"Recappy Chappies With Snappy Serapes"

The year is winding down and so all you are going to see from all sides is Attack of the Year's Recaps. There will be countdowns aplenty and people summing up the year and pontificating about the best songs, the worst shows, the most fascinating people, the most intriguing artisanal cheeses, the top-rated beard groomers, and the must-have nun-habits of 2007. And there will be lots of bloggers tagging other bloggers with year-end recap memes, and although I tecnnically have not yet been tagged, I am anticipating that I will so I am going to declare myself tagged. I should have thought of this technique a long time ago. This way, when I wasn't picked for the dodgeball team in middle school, I coulda just said "eff you, effers. I pick myself for your team. Deal with that."

Two things about that little imaginary anecdote there.

1. I used to get picked pretty quickly for dodgeball. Not first, but somewhere in the front of the middle. So I didn't have that whole picked-last trauma that everyone else seems to have. I have never understood that mathematically- how can SO MANY people have picked-last trauma? If everyone in the world was getting picked last, then who the hell was getting picked first and second and third?

2. I never would have said "eff you, effers" in middle school. I would have said something way more cussy. I had a rotten mouth back in the day. Sorry Mom.

Then, after I had tagged myself for Recapping Fun, I started to think about my year. And I started to type. And you know what? The really Big Events of my 2007...kind of sucked. I mean, I started to look at it and I realized how Eeyore-like it all sounded. First of all, my beloved Dad got sick. Really super serious scary sick. Second of all, my BFF lived far away and this was the first time in years that I hardly ever saw her, which totally felt weird. Third, another (former) BFF of mine, after a couple of years of The Chop Chop Salad between us, finally bowed out of my life for good and it truly broke my heart in a way that was in the back of my mind for much of my year...

Jeez, Wheezy. What kind of jacked up list is that? Because I hadn't thought my year was so bad until I actually started writing this list out. In fact, I had been under the delusion that the year had been ok. Good, even. Because in my head, on a day to day basis, I think about things a certain way that is actually quite sunny. For example, when my dad was sick, I was really upset, yes, but I was also really full of love for him, and I spent a ton of time thinking about how lucky I am to have had a dad like I do, and how many people I know that don't have such great dads. So in the midst of feeling sad about what was happening, I was also feeling at peace about it, in a weird way. I'm not trying to minimize the worry that I felt. I was scared shitless, believe me. But to sum up the whole event by putting it on a list as "my dad almost died in '07" just doesn't feel like a fair assessment of what happened and how it affected my life.

So I'm going to take myself right back off the Recapping Train. At least in the way that I have seen it done, which makes you have to reduce your life into the really big deal events. My life is more than the really big deal events. It's all the little things that add up to my year.

Things like:

Freaking out the Gap ladies.

Rating men and MEN.

Talking in my sleep for the first time ever.

Running around with a horde of librarians.

Going green by subtracting some green.

Becoming an auntie.

Keeping Nordic Boy alive.

Talking on the phone a lot. And always about very important matters of state.

Living in Operaland.

Showing you a 9th grade note.

Showing me some love.

Getting beat up for beauty.

Being cold. I talked about being cold a lot. A really lot.

These are the things that made up my life in 2007. I can't reduce it more than that. Life is, to me, by and large, silly. Day to day weirdo stuff. I'm trying really hard not to use the phrase "fabric of my life" since that will just make everyone think about cotton. But you get what I'm saying right? Life is made of the small things. The unrecappable.

What are the small moments that happened to you in '07? Comment or write about them on your blog.

Look at that. I totally just picked you for my dodgeball team.

I'm out,
Librarian Girl