I feel good about this year ending. I've looked lately at my previous End of year/Christmas posts and they seem so desperately sad. Depressed.
I started this year and spent most of it, feeling the same way. Depressed.
but I feel good now. Positive. I had an epiphany halfway through the year to stop living my life compared to other people and live it how I want.

My New Years resolutions have always been the same. To leave home, to get a proper job, to travel more.
I went to Dublin and New York this year. Dublin is pretty if a little touristy-trappy and New York was, well fucking mental.
I'm glad I went, I did the typical touristy things and ticked them off of the mental list I carry in my head. But America is a strange place with strange people in it, more over the top, more fake-seeming. I wouldnt go back to New York. I'm not cut out for big cities and large crowds.
I did get to move out and in with Welshy, I hate the people we're forced to live with, but a few days at home has reminded me that its loads better than being here.
I like being with him, I hope he likes it too.
I like the effect he has on me, he calms and sedates the part of me thats constantly restless, needing entertainment and to be on the go. Although he complains that I'm constantly tapping my foot or jiggling when we watch telly.
I dont even know i'm doing it half the time.
Its so funny to think that we met four years ago and I dismissed him as being "ok, but no spark" and that he became my almost constant companion for a year before we got together and not one thought of what might happen crossed my mind then!

I still havent got a real job. But you know what? Its ok. I have a test/interview on the 6th (co-incidence that its Dad's deathday? and if I get past that, the interview will be on his funeral day? You decide.)
It'd be good money if I get it.
I want to go back to uni though. I got rejected cos of my lack of maths, but its ok. I'm working my way slowly through the Maths course with lots of tears and tantrums, but its going ok. I hate maths, will always panic if faced with a number higher than 20 but hopefully i'll get that C and then go into clearing.
Once I've done that year long course I want to go do a TEFL course. Welshy longs to escape the UK and live abroad in the south of France, or Italy.
I am an Anglophile. I love travelling and seeing new things, but I always want to come home to what's familiar to me. Foods. Transport. Shitty weather. Plants and animals. Football.
But a year abroad, that appeals.
That's different. That's an adventure. To say that you've lived abroad and can speak another language like a local. To a different way of life.
So if I manage to go down that route, who knows where I'll end up!?

I'm travelling again soon. To India. On the 18th of January for three weeks. I can't wait. it'll kill that travelling bug for now.

I read through some of my earlier posts lately and I cringe at them. How pathetic and childish I was.
Now I realise how much me and my friends have grown and changed.
CL is married two years now to UDOBF (I posted here about how it wouldn't last! How she wanted another man when she first slept with him!) Now she has his child.
I miss MH still a year after we fell out, She was the last person back then that I thought would let me down. But I can't forgive or forget the cruel way she acted.
TP and TJ have their own house, comfortable with their hens and dogs and being in the countryside. I cant imagine any man splitting them up, anymore than I could then.
JF has been living with her bf for two years as has STF. (I still remember him declaring "Charlton this one's different! I dont wanna cheat on her!")
He hasnt neither.
Two cousins that I played with as children have either married or got kids of their own. OF has got married. I am not in touch with her at the moment. I miss that easy friendship we once had.
I started this blog when I was twenty. I am now twenty-six. We are all grown up, no matter how I try to pretend different.
I started this obsessed with a guy who didnt deserve my blind devotion. I havent spoken, nor thought of him for years. Last I heard from MH was that he'd had a kid with the sister of the girl he was seeing at the time.
Lucky escape for me I guess.
I then got involved with a guy who didnt care about me and vice versa. I went to him for comfort that no one could provide for me, when I felt like the lonliest person in the world and when I felt perhaps I could open up to him, he shattered that.
I stayed in touch and we parted as friends, speaking occasionally. But I grew a backbone and got rid and dont regret it.
I have Welshy. My best friend. Maybe not the person I expected back then. But better. (I'd better say that as he reads this)

Its six years since we were the Rowditch Avenue gang, when MH and I did Pound A Pint mondays watching football, eating Pizza, and she cried on the end of my bed after leaving Jena, after a year together, after STF cheated on her. I miss that carefree time, but I dont dwell and wish for it back like I used to. Life is for looking forward. Not back.
I think about the girl who started this blog and I wonder what she'd have thought of my decisions to leave animals and try and become a teacher. She'd be horrified and refuse to believe it probably. But as long as I have animals about me, I'll be ok.
She'd not believe the twists and turns and how friends could turn out to not be.
I am a different person now. Changed by my experiences.

It is four years on the 6th since Dad died. I miss him. Perhaps I'll mention it then, like I've done on here in the past. But at the moment I do not feel sad about him dying. I am glad he lived and was my Dad. Mother feels ready at last to scatter his ashes and we're going to do that in the Summer.
Another sign of moving on...

2009 is ending better than it started, when I feared nothing would ever get any better and I'm confident 2010 will be even better.
My resolutions remain the same. Home of my own, travelling, new job. We'll see how it goes. I still want to achieve the 6 goals I set myself to do by the time I'm 30.
Will I still be writing this bollocks in another 6 years? Fuck knows. But it'll be interesting to see what will happen next...