2002 was the most calm year i've had in a long time as far as personality shifts. i came out of 2002 basically the same person as when i went in; some things that were growing during 2001 continued: i continued to mature, become more dependable, and so forth. i progressed the appropriate amount vocationally. i made a couple of good friends. my acquaintance set shifted a bit. my attitudes towards life and love remained more or less constant, as did my appraisal of what the future is likely to be like. i guess towards the end i started thinking more seriously about having kids and a family (not in the realism sense, just in the daydreaming sense), but that's thinking, not acting. i picked up some better musical tastes, but nothing qualitatively different. i started playing pickup ultimate regularly (at least during DST), but it wasn't a new interest so much as representative of my increased initiative/desperation.
by contrast, each of the previous years dating back to probably around 1993 saw some sort of qualitative personality or lifestyle shift.
2001 was a year of rebuilding my personality to cope with the real world, of adjusting to the point where i could fend off the plethora of annoyances with ease; it was also a year of rebuilding my self-esteem and confidence and so on. i became a lot more independent over 2001; i became less attached to a codependent model of relationships. not coincidentally, i became a lot better at functioning in groups of people, since my personality became more innate and less defined by my relationships with others. it's probably the year of my transition from young-adulthood to adulthood.
2000 was, of course, the year of my actual transition from college into the real world, which came with emotional and physical separation from most of the closest friends i'd ever had, including of course that whole romantic breakup thing. 2000 was probably the worst year i've ever had in terms of delta-happiness, although i needed to go through the end of that year in order to get where i am now (at least in retrospect.) this was the year when i learned, at least in principle, that my actions can have real impact on others.
1999 was the year that i learned about how love is in its steady-state. in a way, this was the precursor to the current thoughts i've been having about family and children and all that; it showed me a side of love that wasn't necessarily in constant flux, which was exciting and incredibly fulfilling nonetheless. 1999 is probably the best year of my life to date, though to tell you the truth 2002 was pretty good. i think, though, the argument for 2002 depends heavily on the premise that i have greater emotional capacity (through normal maturation) now than i did then, which means i'm more capable of appreciating happiness. i think it still falls short, i'm not sure i buy the premise, and in any case if that's the reason it certainly means less. it's like saying that barry larkin is a better player than babe ruth because he succeeded to a lesser extent against much better competition.
1998 was the year i first went to duluth, which convinced me that i could be a mathematician. it was also a year of tremendous emotional ups and downs, probably the biggest roller-coaster year of my life, with the end of my relationship with lisa, the whole thing with danielle where i was convinced i would never have eyes for another girl again and then dead wrong, the most normal relationship i've ever had with margaret, the odd circumstances and ensuing disastrous LDR with kirsten, the trip to the beach with ali, and the amazing beginning of my relationship with adrienne. and that's just [some of] the romantic side of things. 1998 was also the first time i really lived by myself without any real structure, at duluth.
1997 is starting to reach the limit of my faithful memory, but it certainly contained a lot of new experiences. it's probably the year of my transition from adolescence to young-adulthood; i did things during that summer like visit chris in baltimore and joon in boston, the first time i had visited and stayed with friends. it was also really my first exposure to multiple social groups; i learned a lot this year. plus i met chris, who is still the person i've met who i find most similar to myself. this was also the year (second half), where i had my best shot at an enduring best friend to date with the dan lee experience. also, the couply-experience: it was the first and only time in my life when i played at being a married adult, with lisa and the two other couples who i guess formed some basis of a social group. it's the only time that i've really been associated with a social group as part of a couple.
1996 is of course the transition from high school to college, which was certainly the biggest change of my life as far as autonomy goes. tons and tons of new experiences, new settings, and new things to learn. way too numerous to list.
1995 was the year with yvette and all that, a real relationship which didn't work out so well. it turned out to have surprisingly little impact on my future life, i think, but the lifestyle of being in a relationship was at the time incredibly different from anything that went before it. (by "real" i mean "non-long-distance," so that it was part of my everyday life; i don't mean to say that it was terribly meaningful.)
1994 was first girlfriend, first legitimacy for the romantic idealism, which it no doubt nurtured. i take back what i said about the couple-scene before; certainly jean and i and brenda and dan and to a lesser extent anoop and kyung were integrated (along with a couple of others) into a couple scene. but, it being summer camp, it was of course extremely different; we weren't playing at being adults so much as we were playing at being teenagers, which i guess we were.
1993, with the hampshire college summer studies in mathematics program, was the beginning of my life, which is a pretty drastic change. it's where my continuous memory begins; it's where i started having actual friends and actual experiences as opposed to the world of a child. it's where i started gaining a real sense of ideology (with the romantic idealism) and individuality. it's basically the beginning of everything relevant about me; i see little if any link between anything pre-summer of 1993 and my current personality and lifestyle. it's also where i first threw a frisbee, although this is only a side note that's important in retrospect.
there you have it. 2002 is, i believe, the least important year in terms of change of the last ten, which is more damning when you consider that i presumably remember it better. you could argue that knowing i'm leaving grad school next year is a big change, but it hasn't yet affected my personality or lifestyle. it's also fair to note that academic year delimiters are more appropriate for my life thus far, in which case academic year 2001-2002 is probably the cheese.
i'm not sure what 2003 is likely to be. there's an artificial lifestyle change here, of course, with moving from grad school to an actual job after spring 2003 and then moving away right around new year's 2004 if the current plan persists, but ultimately i am unable to predict the future, which is fantastic since i will hopefully get lots of surprises.
happy new year.