FIRST, PLAY THIS. IT WILL GIVE YOU ALL THE FEELS:

For the sake of remembrances, please indulge me briefly.

Things I did in the second half of 2013 (because the first half is too long ago to remember): turned 22; graduated from college; read 35 books for pleasure; re-taught myself to play the piano; spent a lot of hours on the road; fell in love with One Direction; tasted a lot of wine; started running; slept; snorkeled with giant sea turtles; finished all five seasons of Friday Night Lights; galloped on horseback in the Andes; backed up my files to Cloud storage; went on a solo road trip and loved it; flossed; organized my closet; read all 5 Song of Ice & Fire books (those are 1000+ pages each, y’all!) and re-read all 7 Harry Potters; became an Instagram pro; ate a lot of vegetables; spent a good deal of time with family; soul-searched and self-actualized; figured out the kind of person I might like to be—for now, at least.

Things I’m still working on for 2014: completing a yoga handstand; finishing Moby-Dick; going to sleep regularly at a reasonable hour; learning how to properly use Pinterest; deciding where January will take me; brushing up on my Portuguese; finding employment; cleaning my desk; blogging more often.

I’ll end this with a favorite quote.

“Philosophers like to point out that ‘place’ is as much within us as without us. You can demarcate a place on a map, pinpoint its latitude and longitude with global positioning satellites, and kick the very real dirt of its very real ground. But that’s inevitably going to be only half the story.The other half of the story comes from us, from the stories we tell about a place and our experience of it. As the philosopher Edward Casey writes, ‘Stripping away cultural or linguistic accretions, we shall never find a pure place lying underneath.’ All we shall find instead are ‘continuous and changing qualifications of particular places.’ When we travel, we fix a place’s meaning in our minds. It is in the eyes of a pilgrim that a holy site becomes holiest. And in being there, he affirms not only the place’s significance but also his own. Our physical place helps us better know our psychic place — our identity.“

—Andrew Blum, Tubes

Happy New Year y’all. Breathe deep, pop bottles, and play hard.

AND – most importantly – a big thank you to those of you who drop by this little smidgen of space on the interwebs & read what I have to say! You are golden.