Was an incredibly amazing year. I started out the year by flying to Beijing, China in early February, and went from freezing my butt off and speaking Mandarin hesitantly on the first day to carrying a conversation with a taxi driver about the IMF chief’s scandal and navigating the capital’s subway routes by heart. I made friends with people from every continent minus Antarctica, worked at an international non-profit organization in the heart of Beijing’s business district, explored Beijing’s bar and club scene without throwing up (although I did have to nurse a few friends back into health), and learned that Chinese landlords/apartment-handlers can be very conniving folk. I met my maternal grandmother’s relatives in Changsha (长沙) for the first time, and realized that even though people can be raised in an entirely different culture and place, universal concepts such as family, food, and love are the same everywhere.
When I came back to the U.S., I flew to the mid-west (Pittsburgh, to be specific) for my summer internship training and marveled at the emptiness of the streets after being in Asia and how people can possibly digest burgers that are stuffed with french fries (hello, Primanti Brothers). After arriving back in LA - and into the arms of Peter, who I hadn’t seen in 4 months - I settled into a comfortable rhythm of interning at PNC in Pasadena and coming home to relax with my best friend. Once the summer was over, I said goodbye to Peter as we parted ways again, where he went off on his own adventure in Asia.
The fall was a hectic time, but rewarding in the end. I went through a bajillion job interviews (please shoot me if I have to answer a “tell me about yourself” again), took difficult classes (although I stopped going to macroeconomics halfway through the semester - and realized there is no correlation between grades and class attendance), and broke down in tears at one point when a group project I worked my butt off for seemed to be falling apart - which is strange given the fact that job interviews didn’t stress me out nearly as much. In the end, I received a full-time job offer to start work after graduation, bumped up my GPA, fulfilled my goal of writing for a campus newspaper, kept myself from missing Peter too much (kind of), organized a social entrepreneurship/non-profit panel event for LACI, and managed to have fun on the side - largely thanks to both old and new friends.
It’s fitting that I’m ending the year back in Hawaii, my true home, where I’ve been able to reconnect with old friends and classmates that I haven’t seen in an entire year. The saying is really cliche, but you don’t really know what you have until it’s gone - those easy, comfortable friendships where you can say stupid things and talk about anything and it feels perfectly normal, the utterly beautiful weather and beaches that put California’s to shame, the delicious food, the sense of warmth and aloha that you won’t find anywhere else. This is my last real winter break in Hawaii since I’ll be starting work in the real world in LA come July, and I’m trying to enjoy every day, event, and moment as much as I can.
2011, you were an amazing, eye-opening, hectic, relieving, and awesome year. 2012 will bring graduation from college and saying many goodbyes, but the goodbyes won’t be permanent, and I’ll be saying hello to a whole host of other things.
Needless to say, I am pretty darn excited.
