Hello Girls

Hello, Girls. It's . . .  what day is it? Wednesday? Technically, yes, but by the time I'm finished writing this, it will probably be Thursday. Wednesday's only got eight minutes left in it.

Why am I writing on the wrong day of the week?

BECAUSE I'M UNPREDICTABLE! And because I just created a new blog for myself and five friends who want to stay in touch, and I thought, Hey. I should make a post to Facets. Just 'cause.

Girls, it's been more than a year since our project ended. Which is surreal, in a way. I started a new blog about a month after we finished up because, can you believe it? I missed blogging. That one has been going . . . on . . . (I was going to say 'strong,' but the truth is, I have failed so spectacularly so many times to post to that blog on time) for almost a full year now, and it's wrapping up next month.

So how's life, you ask? Am I living in Boston, as I said I would be when last we spoke?

Nope. Still in Bowling Green. Grad School Plan #2 fell through, and I realized -- I was looking at grad schools almost entirely because I felt like that's what I was somehow required to do next with my life, which didn't seem like a good enough reason. So I abandoned that, at least for the time being.

So, yeah, I'm still in BG, but I do have a much firmer moving away date now. The Boy moved out to New York, you see, at the beginning of the year, hired as the Multimedia Coodinator for the Frost Valley YMCA. My contract with Horizon is through June, so I'm here 'til then, and then I'll move out to New York to join him. Also? The Boy proposed last month. So Miss Monday is now an engaged woman. :)

I don't have much else to say. I just felt like popping in to say hello. I don't know when or if you girls will see this, but it's here.

Hello, girls. It's Thursday. I hope your lives are progressing beautifully.

Goodbye for now, Facets!

I've said it several times before and I'll say it again, I still can't believe a year has already passed and our little experiment is ending. Yes, like Cassie said, maybe it didn't turn out how we expected, but I've had a good time and enjoyed getting to know you girls over the past year. Without even noticing, Facets became an ingrained part of my life. Next week is certainly going to feel bizarre without any posts from you all! I know I will be popping back every now and then to read and give updates and I hope to see you here as well in the future. :)

Looking at the year's worth of tags over on the right hand side of the page is making me get all sentimental now... I'm going to miss this!

2022... ten years in the future is a scary time to think about.

Casey: I'm also sorry we lost you so early. You come into my thoughts every so often and I hope you also think of us! I hope everything is going well with you and maybe some day you'll think of us, check out the blog, and update us about your life. :)

Alexandra: I'm sorry we didn't hear from you the last month, but I'm happy that we got to know you over the past year. I hope that it wasn't anything bad that caused your absence. In the future, I hope you are still happily married and have gotten your Canadian residency like you wanted! I admire your conviction and how fully-formed your beliefs are. I hope you're still just as passionate, accepting, and creative! I hope, also, that some of your work has been published and you are happily writing more.

Cassie: Thank you for putting this whole scheme together, it was a great experience and I'm so glad we all did it! I hope that ten years' time finds you happy and where you want to be. I hope your plans for grad school worked out and that you got to live in Boston. I hope you're just as happy doing what you love and that you still feel your work is as rewarding as you do now. Keep being creative, motivated, and driven. You brought five different girls together and made it possible for us to get to know each other and be exposed to different lives. You did not forget to be awesome!

Carlyn: It's been wonderful watching you, over the past year, find such happiness! I hope you're still happily with Meghan. I hope you've successfully finished your grad program and are happy with your career, helping and changing lives. I will miss this project and hearing from you and all the other girls. I also hope you'll stop by every now and then and give us an update! (And I hope the same for every one of us!)

And as for me? I can hardly comprehend being 32, nearly 33, in ten years! I hope that you're happy, really. Whether single, married, kids, no kids... I just hope you're happy! If all goes according to plan, you'll have a PhD or MA, I wonder what it is! (I'm hoping for PhD right now.) Maybe you've discovered some cool language acquisition-related thing by now!

For everyone, really, my biggest hope is that you're happy and where you want to be in life!

As I've said, I'm really going to miss this little part of all of our weeks. I especially have valued recording a bit of our lives each week. In order to keep doing that I'm going to (finally!) start writing in my personal blog here: www.cest-christina.blogspot.com If you're ever curious about what I'm up to, you can drop by and see. :) I'll also stop by here every now and then to see what is happening in your lives and leave an update myself.

Well, I think the time's come... I've been putting it off, but it's time to end the last post of our year- but not of the blog!

As a great man once said, "It's not really goodbye, after all."

Wednesday is tearing up a little bit...

Christina: I am delighted for you and how well you’re doing in France!

Cassie: Your letter piece to me nearly made me cry. I was larger than life when you met me??? Surely you jest! You intimidated ::me::!

Dear FoU Bloggers of the Future,

Considering how quickly this year went by, I’m sure it will seem like a flash before 2022 hits. It’s only ten times as long as we’ve been blogging by this point anyway!

Hopes for all of us: I hope we’re all happy, and I hope we’ve all made progress toward self-fulfillment.

Hopes for Casey, Miss Thursday:
I hope you’re doing well! I’m sorry we lost you, but I hope you remember your time with the FoU ladies fondly and come back from time to time to let us know how you’re doing.

Hopes for Christina, Miss Friday:
I hope your time in France ends wonderfully and that you live your life in a continuously adventurous way. I hope you figure out just what it is you want to do with yourself, and I know (don’t have to hope!) that you’ll do it wonderfully. It has been an honor and a privilege to finish the project with you, and I very much look forward to hearing about how your life continues.

Hopes for Cassie, Miss Monday:
I also hope you’re married to Chase by now : P I hope you’re making a life for yourself doing things you love, because your passion for and skill in what you do are truly inspiring. We had BETTER still be friends, even if that means calling and visiting every once in a while. Our families are going to need to be friends. That’s all there is to that.

Hopes for Alexandra, Miss Tuesday:
I hope you’re achieving all those bits of excitement that are in motion in your life! I hope you’re happily married and enjoying the Canada thing. I’m sorry we missed out on your contributions the last few posts, but it was wonderful to get to know you over most of the year. It will be very good to get updates from you now and then.

I’m going to miss this. I haven’t always wanted to post, but I’ve always been glad when I do. My Wednesdays have been, on a baseline, more enjoyable, because I get to blog.

I hope we’ll all continue to post when big (or little!) things happen in our lives.

And if you ever find yourself near where I am, don’t be a stranger!

(Not that I’m going to be in one place for long over the next ten years. Life at this point is all about adventure and exploration, and I hope we all get our fair tastes of it.)

It has been a delight, ladies.

Miss Wednesday, OUT.

52 Mondays = 1 Year

Dear Girls of the Facets of Us Blog (circa 2022),

Hello, girls. It's Monday. Monday, March 5, 2012, to be precise, the last Monday in our little project.

It's really strange to me that this half-thought-out idea that I had last January, a passing, "Oh, that might be fun," kind of thought has now come to completion. We didn't achieve fame. We didn't gain more than 20 followers. We didn't irrevocably change the world. But we got to know each other a little bit better. And we documented our lives for an entire year.

Girls of Facets of Us in 2022, it is my hope that when you come back to read this letter, you have trouble finding it. It is my hope that it isn't the first post waiting for you on this blog, because it is my hope that this blog will still see us every once and a while. It is my hope that we occasionally find our way back here, to reread and remember and maybe post a JAB here and there about life in general and where we are.

Cassie - I have no idea where 2022 will find you. I hope you're married to Chase by now. I hope you have a Masters degree. I hope you're not still in Bowling Green. I hope you're doing what you love and I hope that you're happy. Remember that letter we wrote when we were 11? I remember occasionally thinking about it in the ten years that followed and trying to remember what I'd written to myself, what gems I'd asked about, what insights I'd shared. And then, when I finally got it, and it came as such a wonderful surprise because I'd managed to forget, I remember being astounded at what had changed, and what had been important to me back then. I wonder if you're reading this now, at age 33, and thinking the same things about me. I am scared of leaving Bowling Green. I am scared of applying for grad school. I am scared that everything I want to accomplish in my life will fall flat, and I hope reading those fears and worries makes you shake your head as much as reading about 11-year-old Cassie's inability to write out Michael's name did when we were 21. (Forgive the grammar of that sentence, please. Verb tense gets so confusing in these things)

Alexandra - I'm sorry we lost you in the last month or so. I think you are the member of this group least similar to myself in many ways, and yet, I also valued your insights. I always felt that you had a lot to share with me, and a lot to share with anyone willing to sit down and listen. I hope you are still happily married. I hope you have achieved Canadian citizenship. I hope you have found success as a writer. I'm glad you agreed to join this project (even if you did throw off the run of C-names we had going on!), and I hope you come back to read it every so often.

Carlyn - I've told this to Meghan, but it applies to you as well: I've spent so much of my life on the fringes of social groups that it's always a little astounding to me when the people I want to be friends with want to be friends with me, too. You were larger than life when I first met you, and a little intimidating, but you knew from John Green and Nerdfighters, and so I asked you to join this project, and I'm so glad I did. You and I better still be in regular contact! After all, we're in a trilationship, you and I and Meghan. Outside of the people related to me, I've never had a friendship that lasted more than ten years, mostly because I've never had a friendship that had the opportunity to, but this had better be one that does. My hopes for you? That you are a wildly successful counselor who is steadily and surely changing the world. That you and Meghan are enjoying a wonderful, crazy, batshit insane life together. That you and Desmond the rental car of awesome have been reunited (though hopefully without Magellan, because let's be real. No one likes him). That you still call me Miss Monday even though this blog project came to a close a decade ago.

Casey - I'm sorry we lost you so early on. I hope, every once in a while, you remember us with fondness, and that the few months you spent here were worth it. I hope that life hasn't overwhelmed you too badly. I hope that, in giving up the blog, you were able to breathe a little easier and stress a little less. I hope you know there are no hard feelings. I'm glad you were here the weeks that you were. I enjoyed even the small chance to get to know you better.

Christina - You were the first person I approached when I thought about actually trying to make this a real thing. I remember thinking that your energy and enthusiasm would be catching, and I was certainly right! I hope you've discovered your passion in life. I hope you've continued to travel the world and make amazing memories and see amazing things. I'm glad you brought friends here that read and commented every so often to remind us that we were not entirely alone here on this blog. I'm glad you stuck through to the end. I have the highest hopes that you will return here every so often to leave an update on your life as it unfolds, and that you will read the JABs of anyone else who does likewise. Thanks for thinking my crazy idea was worth giving a shot. In a lot of ways, you're the reason this actually happened.

Girls, it's been a pleasure and a privilege. It is my sincerest hope that we do return in ten years and reread these posts, to remind us of who we were in 2011-2012. Assuming, of course, that the world doesn't end in nine months, in which case, this was all a little pointless, wasn't it? :) Thanks for being a facet. Thanks for saying yes a year ago. Thanks for sharing a piece of your life with the rest of us.

Sincerely,
Miss Monday

Week 52: One Year Gone

Hello girls.

Well, 51 weeks have come and gone, and now we stand on the precipice of the final week of this blogging project.

For our final week, then I think we should look to the future. We wrote to our past selves, so now, let's write letters to our future selves: the members of the Facets of Us blog ten years in the future.

Christina revisits the first Friday

It's a bit crazy to see the changes that have happened for you two over the past year! I still have trouble believing we've actually been doing this for that long.

Having just reread my first post, I'm a bit surprised to see that I haven't really changed all that much. The things I said in my first post describing myself are still true. The thing that has changed, however, is the things I would choose to talk about in describing myself. Whereas I chose to talk about only-childom, my different social groups, realism, and some other things, these days I would focus on independence and adapting. The past year I have, I think, greatly developed the skill to adapt. This seems completely logical seeing as I've been living in a foreign country for five of the last (nearly!) twelve months. My view has shifted from the relatively narrow one of college classes and my thesis to a wider one of France, graduate programs, world travels, and how to support myself in the future.

I think I've also become better at meeting new people and developing relationships. I've carved out a little life for me in my French hometown. I have a regular cafe I go to and am friends with many of the workers there. I have acquaintances and friends who live in the town, as well as friends who are fellow assistants. I've enjoyed increasing my circle of friends and watching their web of different countries evolve to include more locations.

One final difference, I think I've become much better at living on my own, being smart with my money, etc. This is the first time I've really been on my own: buying my own groceries, paying my rent, buying a coat, things like that. It's certainly been a new experience, one that I'm still working at. I tend to use up all my money on travel and then end up skimping on groceries at the end of every month! But when am I next going to be able to do all this traveling in Europe, right?

Well, there you have it, how I've changed in the past year! As it turns out... not too much (at least not that I can notice)! I wrote my first post from my apartment in Michigan and I'm not writing this one from my friend Sarah's apartment in Paris- the last year seems to have gone pretty well!

Wednesday is all KINDS of different. But also the same.

Christina: It’s always interesting to see what we forget!

Cassie: I love Mulan. It was a go-to-everyone-likes-it movie when I was a kid.

Who was I a year ago?

A year ago, I wrote to you about my “flagrant lack of romantic experience.” I had had my first kiss “six-odd short months ago,” and had just ended a very short fling with a fellow that I now laugh about occasionally with my incredible girlfriend of almost nine months.

I still get worked up about inequality and suicide, probably now even more than before, now that I’m almost halfway done with a counseling program. I see inequality and its effects on people in all sorts of situations in my current line of work, and I’m working to (among other things) help prevent suicide on the front lines, helping people directly when they are in need.

I wrote in my first post about my best friend. She was very good for me for a while, but we are no longer friends. The timing of this break coincided with her moving out of our apartment and the approximate time of my relationship starting with That Wonderful Hardward Store Employee—the latter event being, according to Ashley, the reason for our friendship ending, though this is incorrect.

I still have a lot of friends, more now even than before. I have had the pleasure of maintaining, and even cultivating, many friendships from my undergrad town, and I have made oodles of friends here in my new home at grad school.

I now have five tattoos, this year’s addition being a small asterisk on the inside of my right pinky. I’m also planning a few more.

I closed down my jewelry company. I still make things from time to time, but I was really sick of dealing with IRS paperwork and taxes when I never sold anything anyway. So that’s over.

In my third-ever post, I wrote about the uncertainty that I was comfortable with in life. I no longer have quite that uncertainty! I have a career path. I have a life path. I have someone to spend all that wonderful time with.

Finally, I am slightly ashamed to admit that I have not consumed a single but of Nerdfighter media in the entire year we’ve been at this. This surprises me, as I have enjoyed it very much in the past.

This has been a fun ride, everyone. I haven’t always wanted to blog on Wednesdays, but I’m proud to say that, while I’ve been late a couple times, I have never missed a week, and I’m going to miss it.

See you again next week!