2006: An Overview

It's actually February of 2007 as I'm writing this, but I feel the need to put 2006 into words or something tangible so that I can finally put it away.

In retrospect 2006 was full of stress and emotion with the occasional bright spot. Some major things that happened were that my sister came to live with me to finish her senior year in high school, Per started school in Vancouver, and I ALMOST enrolled in school.

Julia lived with Fred and I in the 2-bedroom apartment on 23rd Ave for five months. Most of the time, it was really fun having her here. It was, however, a true test for me. Although I had laid out the few rules before she got here, the whole five months still found me walking the very fine line between parenting and being the cool older sister. It was a good time in many ways, and now that she's back in Texas, I wish she still lived here. But by the end of the five months, I needed it to end. I needed to not have someone else counting on me.

The end of her school year coincided with Per's arrival for the summer. Overlapping by a few days, we took the opportunity to take a trip together- all three of us- out to Vashon Island for a couple of days. That was really fun. We rode bikes to the beach and sat up in a teepee with a campfire inside. We all just relaxed. We had a going away party for Julia, but I wasn't as present as I should have been or would like to have been. There was just too much unspoken emotion between us, so hours before she left we desperately tried to say everything in an explosion of tears, yelling, hurt, and some reconciliation. It took me months to get over all my emotions of those five months, and I didn't have the immediate consolation of knowing it had all been for the best because I honestly couldn't tell at that point if it had. But I hope it was.

Shortly before Julia was went back, we got some shocking and sobering news from home. A very close family friend- my dad's best friend- had been killed suddenly in a terrible car accident. The news was too unbelieveable to understand. It was one of the most devastating losses our family has ever endured. I looked for plane tickets but found nothing under $700- way too much to realistically consider. It felt terrible to not be able to be with my dad, but it was a great comfort to have my sister here, someone who understood the loss. I haven't cried so much about someone in a very long time. I still can't believe it since I didn't experience any closure like a funeral, but I guess things like this can never truly be understood or even accepted. Jim isn't the only person who's death will never seem final to me. I will always feel like there's hope of seeing him again when I go home.

The summer was a funny mish-mash of things. Fred moved out and Per and I had the apartment to ourselves. I however, had been ready to move on from there for a while, so I started packing up my things and looking for new places months before I ended up moving. Fred's friends Colin and Angelica had left their car in Fred's car and he'd passed it on to us. After a couple of weeks the car-owners informed us of a delay in their return which meant we'd have the car for the whole summer. That ended up being really cool. We made trips when we could: to Bellingham, the Olympic Penninsula, and various other places outside of Seattle. Per got a job doing web work for a guy that worked with me a the hostel. It was a good summer, but I felt desperate and unsettled for the whole thing.

In the fall I moved into a studio apartment by myself and Per moved to Vancouver to start school. I entertained the idea of enrolling in the community college here, and even made it as far as taking the entry exam and filling out admissions forms... but the timing for actually taking class just hasn't been right yet. I also entertained (or obsessed over) finding a new job, but that one hasn't managed to happen yet either. There were big changes at work, so I convinced myself to hold off on the job hunt until things were running smoothly at the hostel- that is still a work in progress.

Living close to Per has been the best thing. We see each other every other weekend, or more often sometimes. The bus takes just 3 1/2 hours either way and then you're in someone else's world- or they are in yours. Vancouver is a cool city, though it feels much larger and much more metropolitan than Seattle. It's a nice place to get away to. It's still hard to believe that a New Orleans shaman in the French quarter told us back in 2002 that this was the year we'd be living in a mountainous region. If his other predictions are right, 2007 is the year we get married (which is indeed the plan)- but it's no big surprise that we haven't made any decisions on that yet. Let's just hope we're ready if his last prediction comes true: that we'll have our first child in 2008!

One day toward the end of fall, my mom called me and said that she was divorcing my dad. She had filed way back in February and kept it to herself for almost nine months. Of course this was not a complete surprise, but the fact that she'd been the one to muster the energy and decisiveness to do it was a shock to us all. The hardest part about the news was hoping my dad would be okay with everything else he'd already been though. 2006 was a doozy.

For the holidays we went to Austin for a week. We had a hotel and a rental car so we were totally independent for a change. My dad still lived at the house, but my mom had gotten her own place. It was a time concentrated on family. I visited friends only for a few hours each, and spent the rest of the time seeing cousins I hadn't seen in 20 years, opening Christmas presents with my grandmother, rummaging through my boxes in my parents' attic, and driving on Texas roads. I couldn't think of a better way to close the year and open my arms to the new one. And I really have a good feeling about this one.



Book List 2006:

Into the Wild, John Krakauer
Under the Banner of Heaven, John Krakauer
Blink, Malcom Gladwell