Look Everybody, It's a List!

As the year draws to a close, I've been doing a lot of thinking about the past twelve months and how strange and awesome and miserable/magical they were. This past semester was rough on a lot of levels - PSA: never take 4 research seminars at once - but, in looking at the year as a whole, it occurs to me that I did a lot of crazy, incredible stuff in 2013. Obviously, it's my civic duty as a blogger and internet user to craft some sort of year in review post, and in thinking over the ways I could do this, I settled on a plain old list. I did a lot of things in 2013, my friends - and here, in roughly chronological order, they are.

• Made the 10-hour drive from Atlanta to Miami in a mere 14 hours after getting stuck behind a crashed pig truck, which is one of those things that really you just can't make up. 
• Watched the sun rise on South Beach.
• [Insert European Guesthouse comment here] 
• Witnessed the slaughtering of Notre Dame football by the evil Alabama, but it was the national championship and I was there, so let's not pretend this was a bad thing.
• Moved to London. 
• Got "food poisoning" one week after moving to London and one hour after hearing about the Manti Te'o Fake Dead Girlfriend Scandal, so thanks for upsetting my "stomach," "Uncle Ben's Express Rice" 
• Watched the sun rise from the courtyard of Edinburgh Castle. 
• Bought the perfect sweater at Topshop and lost it - literally lost it - within 12 hours. Just to bring things down a couple notches here. 
• Did this: 

• Saw Les Miserables on the West End. Twice.
• Spent the night on a boat hostel in Amsterdam that I had booked five days previously. 
• Didn't die. 
• Went to Amsterdam and didn't do drugs.

Ladies is pimps too, go and brush your shoulders off.

• Took a transcontinental flight across Europe by myself. 
• Haggled with an Italian saleslady in French for a purse I was buying at the Florentine leather markets because English is not always the universal language.
• Did a Tuscan wine tour for my twenty-first birthday because doesn't everyone? 
• Lived in this apartment down the street from Notre Dame (the French one) for five days. 

A decent view of the place, though there were more fresh flowers when we were there. 

And you can't see the glass doors or the bedroom chandelier in this photo.

• Spent a full afternoon in a Parisian police station, in the category of "things that three years of high school French did not prepare me for"
• Saw Hogwarts/sat in Hagrid's flying motorcycle/basically died and went to heaven. 
• Saw the Pope. 
• Rode the London night bus, at 1 AM, in the opposite direction of my home, while carrying a duffel bag of all my earthly possessions and wearing a pencil skirt and sneakers, for about twenty minutes. 
• Again, didn't die. Somehow. Not honestly sure how I pulled that one off. 
• Allowed a stranger from off the street to climb into my bedroom window. 
• Took this sweet pic with him.

Missin u, Greg

• Overdrew my credit card for the first (and only!) time buying margaritas and miniature tacos at a Mexican restaurant made of shipping containers on the South Bank of the Thames.
• Moved back to America. 
• Sang a concert at a church in Harlem while soaked head to toe after walking from Rockefeller Center to Lincoln Center in a rainstorm and, in the process, hailing a New York City cab by myself. Again, 

• Climbed to the top of a volcano. 
• Snorkeled. 
• Got almost tan kind of. Thanks, Hawaii! 
• Started senior year off with a bang a trip to a bar on a Saturday night, which I wouldn't do again for three full months! Hashtag YOLO! 
• Appeared in a full-fledged musical with a four-person cast and a thirteen-day rehearsal schedule. 
• Came down with pneumonia on opening day of said musical. Went on every night in said musical anyway. 
• Re: the above: very nearly died.
• Watched The Breakfast Club and Heathers and Clueless for the first time and did very little else for the months of September and October, because pneumonia. 
• Got a parking ticket at a university that I do not attend. 
• Had said parking ticket rescinded. And AGAIN: 

• Brought an umbrella to Feverween. 
• Made lots of friends in Feverween entrance line. 
• Saw a David Sedaris live show, which was, depressingly, the closest thing to a concert I went to this year besides the Dierks Bentley concert in Miami that I guess I was technically present for but paid exactly no attention to whatsoever. 
• Did this: 

Inhalers: 2013's hottest Finny's accessory 

• Did THIS: 

See also: threw up a whole lot of thumbs ups

• Sneakily got cast in my second PEMCo show in one year after - surprise! - never actually acting in a PEMCo show before.
• Shared a table with a literal homeless man while doing homework at the Logansport-Cass County Public Library.
• Actively participated in observed the placing of a bike in a tree and a scarf on a campus statue after three and a half years of empty, meaningless rule following.
• Wrote 80 pages of papers for one single finals week, and still emerged with a perfectly respectable and borderline impressive GPA, despite what my mother thinks. 
• Didn't die. 

So, 2013, you were quite the year (particularly the first half of you). It'll be tough for 2014 to top you, but for now, here's to starting next year like we started the last one: in Florida. Have a happy new year, readers - see you on the flip side.