A Very Good Year

"When I was 21
It was a very good year
It was a very good year for
City girls who lived up the stair
With all that perfumed hair
And it came undone
When I was 21"

2008 was a very good year. Contrary to what the morose headlines in the news suggest, this year was, in fact, the best, at least for me.

While my year contained none of the bygone romances Sinatra so wistfully recounts, yours truly finally became a city girl, exploring her way through Spain's capital city. And last March I did get the best haircut ever, an 11-euro deal whose layers and bangs curled in just the right way around my oval-shaped face. But on to the important stuff.

The first half of this year was all about travel. I logged close to 25,000 miles by air (unfortunately I only just registered for a frequent-flier program two weeks ago) and another 6,000 by bus, train and car across Western Europe and the eastern United States. That adds up to about 59 hours by air and 117 hours on the ground, for a grand total of 176 hours, or the equivalent of one entire week spent sitting in a chair waiting to be a tourist.

Exhausting? You bet. And the days sandwiched between those travels typically offered no break as I constantly searched for things to do and see in Madrid. More times than I care to remember I asked myself, why is it that I'm walking through [insert city name here] but all I really want to do is crawl into my own bed and sleep.

But outnumbering those instances were the ones where I looked around and thought simply, Wow. I thanked God every night, not just for the chance to travel, but for the loving Spanish family I joined, the engaging Spanish professors I had and the energetic Spanish language I spoke.

Come June, castellano was replaced with talk of cloture and voice votes as the Eurotripping gave way to my summer internship covering congressional hearings. Enter the second major theme of this year: my increasing love of journalism. A few weeks into the gig, once the politicians became just people and the wood-paneled hearing rooms lost their luster, I realized I really liked deciphering these complicated bill discussions and delving into the minutiae of policy.

Then my journalism-filled semester rolled around, and I was hooked. I fought it for three years, but the j-school won and I realized that maybe, just maybe, I could pull off writing for a living. I, of course, realized this after throwing myself into the grad school/law school process, thinking for sure that foreign policy was my future. And so here I am, ending the year with no definite plan but a smile still plastered on my face.

Of course, 2008 wasn't perfect.

In Madrid, it took almost eight weeks for me to settle into a close group of friends. And it took the same amount of time for me to get back in the groove with school friends once this semester started. The 15-pound weight gain I deftly evaded freshman year found its way to my butt, thighs and belly via La Mallorquina (damn you chocolate napolitanos). And in more ways than one, I realized that life is a hell of a lot more complicated than I ever could have imagined.

2008 was the most exciting year I have ever had. But I suspect it was just a preview, the appetizer to the glorious main course of change that is making its way out of the kitchen.

I hope that everyone out there is as excited as I am for whatever 2009 has in store. Happy New Year!