- Last night: Swing dancing to a live band in a dance studio hidden away in a nondescript apartment building in Kyiv (after getting lost on the way there, when Google Maps decided to take me through a forest and then tried to make me cross a whole bunch of railroad tracks at a place they really aren't supposed to be crossed... I disobeyed Google and climbed my way up a muddy hill back to the road it said I didn't need to be on, and luckily didn't get my stuff too dirty in the process). At midnight we all lit sparklers in the dance studio, because it's Ukraine and you can light things on fire indoors.
- One year ago: Driving a couple of visiting friends through the front pasture on my parents' property because a sudden power outage rendered the driveway gate un-openable and nearly had us trapped. Our rebellious streak continued as we illegally pulled over on an off-ramp spanning the river (like all the other drivers were doing :-p ) to watch the midnight fireworks over my home city of Sacramento.
- Two years ago: Dancing blues and fusion in snowy, snowy Chicago. It was my first winter in the Midwest, and it was gorgeous. My truck doors didn't even freeze shut that night (I had learned how to avoid that rookie error the hard way...)
I don't know if I'll ever top NYE 2011/2012, when I had to sleep in London Stansted airport on my way back home to Dublin, because even though I had booked a hotel, I hadn't anticipated the massive holiday taxi fare hike or the fact that hotel shuttles wouldn't be running on NYE. Upon returning from a day trip to Stratford-upon-Avon (yay Shakespeare!) I realized I couldn't afford a ride to my hotel, so I slept in the airport, flew back to Dublin on New Year's Day, and then walked all the way from the airport to my apartment because I had no bus money... even waking up in a hammock in Panama on the first day of 2014 doesn't quite top that (although I'd say it's a close second).
Anyway, (mis)adventures and celebrations aside, this first day of 2018 seems a good time to try and remember what the heck happened in my life in 2017. It was a very scattered and fragmented year: 2.5 months working something like 4 part-time jobs in Sacramento, followed by 3 months of Peace Corps training in Chernihiv (way up by Belarus), 6 months living in a village-like neighborhood outside of Cherkasy (not by Belarus) and then finally - in the last month of the year - getting my own place and feeling like I have finally arrived. In the past year, I've lived with three different families (including my own), been a resident of two different countries and three different cities, had four different addresses, and gone from being unable to hear the difference between the Ukrainian and Russian languages, to being able to explain in Ukrainian why I don't understand Russian (and then make excuses for why I haven't started studying both). In 2017, I started the year not knowing where I would spend most of it. It feels good to start 2018 with the expectation that I have a whole year ahead of me in this community that I have recently gotten to know.
In the midst of all this shifting and changing, I was also lucky enough to witness major milestones in the lives of some of my best friends back home. I gave a toast as Maid of Honor at my friend's wedding, dropping my handwritten binder-paper notes and spilling champagne on them in the middle of the speech. I held the first child of another one of my best friends, and somehow managed not to inflict some sort of lasting trauma on either of us. I'm usually petrified at the thought of holding babies, but this one was my friend's daughter, so I managed to not run away in terror.
2017 is not a year I can easily sum up, because it has been all over the place. I was learning noun declensions while friends got married and had children, US national politics went haywire, and what seemed like half my state burned down. 2017 brought bursts of spring tulips, the sweet anticipation of hearing a train whistle at the start of a journey, the unmitigated confusion of Ukrainian village council meetings, more middle-school drama than I ever had in middle school, more calls to Congress than I've ever made in any preceding year, and the startling feeling of seeing a familiar face as if for the first time, when for just a moment the fog of a language barrier is punctured by mutual understanding. It brought tragedy and hope as I watched friends back home work to rescue animals in need. It brought humility, because living overseas is fucking hard. 2017 is the year that called for teaching my Ukrainian counterpart how to say phrases like "when the shit hits the fan". 2017 isn't a year with a clear narrative for me; it has no definitive story arc. But 2017 got me to where I am now, and I feel pretty good with starting 2018 from where I ended up.
