If we ignore the first week of January, it’s safe to say that I was seventeen in 2004, the second half of my junior year of high school and the first half of my senior year of high school, or the part of life I wanted to capture with my characters. This is where I kick myself. See, I was never a normal high school senior. I don’t mean that I didn’t fall into any of the typical cliques or anything like that. No, I mean I was not at my high school during my senior year of high school, channeling my boredom with high school classes into further academic challenge at a local college. I enjoyed this experience, but I knew it would bite me later–not in the social sense (I wasn’t very far up in the social hierarchy to begin with), but in my writing.

That aside, let’s look at my own experiences. I still knew a lot of people, and they knew me, but many of my friends from the first few years of high school had already graduated, and I was in a transitional phase. I was making new friends in lower years while beginning to bond with a few people in my own class. Despite this, I still felt like an outsider to the world around me. Everyone else knew something that I didn’t about how to be social and included. The social hierarchy had been established, and I was trying to get back in.

One of the main things that stand out in 2004 is my academic schedule in the spring of my junior year. I graduated second in a class of 285 students, and the valedictorian of my class and I were friends. I was an academic masochist even back then, and I talked her into taking some of the hardest senior-level classes as juniors. This plan partly backfired because many of the honors and AP classes conflicted with each other, thus screwing with what appeared on the surface to be a brilliant plan. This screwup only affected my schedule; because she had taken a class that I hadn’t already taken, my plan gave both of us insane schedules, but her even more so.

2004 was also my second year of NaNoWriYe (yes, it existed then). I did and won NaNoWriMo for the third time. 2004 was even more difficult thanks to my schedule, but I managed to write something on top of my academics and extracurriculars. I often doubted myself and my ability to write during this period, probably because stories didn’t just rain from the skies into my head. After all, published authors just made it look so easy. I definitely started NaNoVangelising during this time, as the only people I knew in my area who were doing NaNoWriMo were the people I told about it. Another notable writing moment was my attempt to convince an English teacher to let me write a novel instead of a research paper. Several of my classmates protested just in case she did say yes. (She didn’t, though she did think I was crazy for suggesting it.)

I was also active in many extracurricular activities: Academic Bowl, French Club, French Honor Society, National Honor Society, Beta Club, FBLA, on and on and on, but those were the main ones. The janitors got to know me very well as I left the school, and these activities kept me around after school most often than not. I met a lot of people through these groups, but I was rarely an officer, possibly thanks to that thing called popularity. I was known. I was not popular. It was definitely better than riding the bus, especially since medical conditions kept me from driving.

Church played a larger role in my life back then. I volunteered in the church library, particularly in the children’s section, and was active in the youth group. We had a close group that was rocked by the departure of a fun youth pastor. The only thing I miss about organized religion is the immediate social group you gain from the church. Church event? Let’s go! And if you were Baptist like I was, there was always food.

I also thought much less about boys than I did during my first two years. I had crushes, yes, but not to the level that I did then. Crushes were distracting, both for schoolwork and writing, the most important things in my life at the time.

I was also thinking about colleges: where to go, what I wanted to do (creative writing/English and French at the time), all those questions. In the end my decisions were based on who had a good English department and what cities had strong NaNoWriMo communities. I think I made a good choice, even if I didn’t end up studying English.

I made my first ever B during my first semester of senior year. At the time I thought it would crush me. Now I see that it liberated me, even if a small part of me hurt every time I saw a B on my grade report.

And for those who wonder, people called me Sushi back then. In fact, people called me Sushi for years before that.

Wake up. Eat. Perform acts of hygiene. Dress. Ponder writing but remember that I haven’t checked email since last night, and that was a really long time.

Turn on computer; turn on music, Pidgin, and Firefox. IM people. Check email. Read Twitter before doing so would be more hassle than it’s worth. Read blogs. Cue tab explosion. Bookmark links of interest.

Realize that I’m hungry again from breakfast because the time between dinner last night and breakfast today was a long time. Ponder eating again. Possibly eat again, then return to computer. Look at time; read remaining blogs. Ponder writing, but know that other inhabitants of this house will come in and bother me before I get in the groove. Decide against it. Ponder writing blog post. Decide against it after lack of topic. Apply to jobs instead. Realize that my plans to get out of the house that day have failed yet again.

Eat dinner. Shower. Edit. Write in paper journal. Write blog post. Go to bed. Think thinky thoughts while trying to go to sleep.

What you see is not always what you get. Never forget that.

Sometimes reality does the job for us. We see everyday events and ask ourselves how such a thing could have happened. Maybe it was depressing, or delightful, or downright bizarre, like the zebra found in downtown Atlanta today. I was away from the computer when the story broke, and upon returning I saw people mentioning zebras. Naturally my first reaction was “What on earth are you talking about?” before looking up the event myself. Written in fiction, much more setup would be needed in order in order for the writer to lie successfully. In real life, the story just works.

This shouldn’t stop us from writing the bizzare, though. Sometimes the bizzare stories do make the best ones. Take those and write them, cherishing their quirky nature. Just remember that you’re going to have to craft a great story in order for people to believe it, just like in life.

The only people who responded were those whose online whereabouts I already knew. No one else bothered, not those I went to high school with (not that I expected them to anyway), nor my college friends (some of whom think being on Facebook counts as being web savvy). What does this say about me? Despite not promoting my Facebook profile all over the Internet, I do tend to add people I know primarily online and have interacted with significantly on Facebook, though I don’t add people willy-nilly; on Facebook I at least try to find out who they are, if only because the account is attached to my real name (though it’s not hard to figure out thanks to Friend Finder).

There were a few bumps in the road in the beginning, namely the fact that Facebook’s RSS feed doesn’t update as often as other feeds do. This is only noticeable because I’ll receive about thirty status updates at once to read. This is probably for the best because no one needs that much information at once, and I can read Facebook statuses quickly.

Speaking of Facebook statuses, I’ve actually been reading them. Now that I’m reading the RSS feed and not the home page, the experience is much like Twitter now that the statuses are no longer competing with Mafia Wars, Farmville, and Five Things You Can’t Live Without. I’ve even been commenting on them more often than when reading from the home page, a great way to convince people that in fact I’m not dead (yet).

What does this say about how I interact with people online? Obviously there are people I’m friends with wherever we can be friends: Facebook, Twitter, LiveJournal, NaNoWriMo, the list goes on. This isn’t the case with most people, and I don’t interact with most of my Facebook friends at all, in particular the people from high school. I’m much more likely to interact with people from college and people I know from other online media. My birthday was two weeks ago, and the writing on the wall points toward this fact: Of the people who wrote on my wall or sent me messages to wish me happy birthday through Facebook, only three were from high school. Even more were people I know through other sites (and some of them duplicated their efforts, and I received more birthday wishes from people through other sites), and even more are from people I know through college.

Unfortunately, Facebook doesn’t make it easy to tell how many people I know from high school, college, and everywhere else, so I can’t say whether these numbers are expected. The easy way would be to tell how many people are in a given list, but Facebook doesn’t offer this option. It should.

Even if these numbers are expected, I know exactly what they’re telling me: Internet friendship from people you never interacted with in the first place is meaningless. Exactly what everyone knew all along. Some things never change.

Interestingly, it’s supposed to be colder tomorrow, yet no snow. I confess myself disappointed, weather.

So, goals for 2010? Resolutions? I’ll figure those out. First though is figuring out my life situation and how to make things better.

But that’ll come in 2010 when I can evaluate 2009 properly. You never know what could happen in the next fourteen minutes.

Thinking back to those says, I now see that Santa’s really quite creepy. Kids sit on his lap and tell him what they want, and Santa welcomes them. He breaks into your house at night and leaves evidence that he has been there. He eats your food. Food that you’ve left out for him, sure, but he eats your food all the same. I love cookies. I don’t want Santa eating my cookies. Then somehow he gets back out and rides off into the night. He’s the reverse criminal in a really strange way.

None of this stopped me from watching NORAD’s Santa tracker tonight, though. I opened it when someone mentioned it on Twitter, I believe when Santa entered North America. Santa chilled out in the islands, which brings up another point–this man must dress in layers in order to stay comfortable for the whole night. Then he swooped back into South America before visiting the US and visited the stop nearest me.

Maybe Santa didn’t stop by my current town at the moment because I’m still awake, another remnant of what my parents told me about Santa. Maybe it’s just another element of Santa magic. Who knows?

Whatever it is, may each of you have a very happy holiday, or may you have already had it if you’ve already celebrated. Be safe and enjoy.

Despite being nowhere near accepting a marriage proposal, I’m a sucker for unusual marriage proposals. For me it’s an insight into the human psyche: how exactly does one ask to stay together (in theory) forever? Throwing a website online and letting the proposed one find it? That’s been done. Proposal via Twitter? That has been done–several times, in fact. Proposal via LiveJournal? Done. Facebook? Unfortunately, that has been done, even through the ever-growing Mafia Wars.

But there’s something new out, something that won’t become popular until smartphones are the norm: Foursquare. It’s still new, and thanks to my lack of web data plan on my phone I haven’t had a chance to explore it yet. The gist of the site sounds silly to me: claiming places and checking in to places you’ve been. Today someone used it for a marriage proposal. Not kidding.

So what’s next? Going back to basic principles?