'Tis the Season

Winter is such a nice time. Last night was the first night of Hanukkah! And only 16 days until Christmas! And on the 21st, the world ends! I'm so excited! :)

And it's also the time to put on your creepy Christmas music! Remember this? http://www.blablablayapyapyap.blogspot.com/2011/12/baby-its-creepy-outside.html

And here's a great radio show about some more creepy Christmas music:

http://soundcheck.wnyc.org/2012/dec/04/we-wish-you-creepy-christmas/

I really like the holiday season. Pine trees out on the streets, snow falling (if the global climate change isn't too bad), hot chocolate and decorations everywhere. And you can see your breath in a little white cloud, which I think is really cool.

And I am ready for good things to happen. And if something bad happens, who cares, because it's such an amazing time that negativity really doesn't matter. I'll just move on. And I don't have to wait for something great to happen. I can make it happen myself. I'm excited!

Blogaversary!

This past year has just been amazing. From the very first day of this blog to now, so much has happened. And so much more still will happen. I'm looking forward to it.

But today, I can gladly say this blog has been around for a year.

A year ago today, I started doing something that I didn't particularly want to do. I thought it was kind of a waste of time because no one would read it anyway. And now, this thing, my blog has been around for a year. One of the best years ever.

Yeah, there were some ups and downs, but overall, it's been fun. Life has been like a scatter plot, a graph with lots of points all over the place. Some dots low, some dots high. But if you look at it overall, you can see there's a positive correlation - the dots are steadily rising, and life is slowly getting better.

I am still sad that last school year had to end, but I hope life will still keep getting better. It seems like it will.

So here's to a great year! Happy New Blog Year! It will be better than ever!

A Million Dollars

Sometimes people in game shows seem really stupid. They manage to get half a million dollars, yet they risk it all to get a million.

Yet I feel like I am beginning to understand this. Right now, my English class is, ehh, okay. Not great. Definitely not as good as last year. At first I really didn't like it, but I am finding some ways to make myself enjoy it. And it's working pretty well.

But today I was trying to improve English for my whole class. And... it didn't work. Me and two other students were teaching in front of the class and I was trying to make it interesting, but I couldn't figure out how to. And no one else seemed to think it was possible for English class to become fun.

So I keep thinking, maybe I should just quit. Stop even trying. Take the money and run. And I have this irrational fear that if I try to make the class better, it will just end up getting worse somehow. Yet I still want to make the class better. I still want that million dollars.

That's the issue: what do I do next? Stay with what I have, or try, even though I don't have any cooperation, to make things better. I'm not sure. And it always comes back to the fact that it was so much better last year. But this is not last year. Not everything has changed, but enough has that I can't think about how great it was then, because that will get me nowhere now.

It's time to start over. But what's the first step? I don't know. 

Coincidences

On Wednesday, we chose new books in English class. I ended up rereading Slaughterhouse-Five (SH5) by Kurt Vonnegut, which I read last year, but I was okay with that.

However, when I went onto Goodreads, I came across a dilemma: how do I say I am currently-reading a book that's already in my read list? Turns out it was pretty easy. But when I looked at SH5 on Goodreads it said: "read from November 28 to December 5, 2011."

The funny thing is, this Wednesday, when I started reading the book for the second time, was November 28th. The same day I entered it on Goodreads last year.

But wait, there's more!

Thinking about having read the book last year, I was looking through my old blog posts from around that time. And my first blog post was written on December 5, 2011.

Coincidences are really fun. Some people would think this is a sign or something, that I'm going to start a new blog on the fifth, or finish SH5 on the fifth again. I think it's just a cool, random thing that happened.

I think coincidences are kind of like the world's way of writing things in bold.

Just because something is written in bold doesn't necessarily mean it's important. But if you read a paper, and there's something in bold, you're going to wonder why, and you're going to think about it, probably more than you think about the other parts of the paper.

That's what happened here. The weird Goodreads coincidence made me think about last year, and starting this blog, and reading SH5 for the first time and all the nice moments that happened around that time. And how different this year is from last year. Yet  some things are the same, and it just shows that no matter how different two things or time periods are there's always going to be some kind of connection between them.

And that's kind of comforting, because it's a way to handle change. I can think, "yeah, it's a year later, but really not much has changed. I'm still posting on this blog I started, and now I'm reading SH5 again and I'm still thinking deeply about it. And now I can do all of the things I wanted to do last year, but never got a chance to do. Because I still have time this year, even though last year is gone. Because not everything has changed."

And it's so true: not everything has changed.