Buy Or Don’t Buy

By most accounts, 2008 was a pretty bad/horrible/disastrous year. After spending the whole in a recession, our economy went into total meltdown in September. Name any industry, it’s failing. We lost almost 2 million jobs. Unemployment is just under 7%. From January to December, the Dow-Jones dropped 30% in value.

Aside from the economy, we still had the wars in Iraq  and Afghanistan, as people stopped caring about the former and continued not caring about the latter, despite record-setting levels of violence there. Even worse was what we had to tell ourselves not to care about. China got the Olympics and we had to pretend that all our debt was held by a friendly world power instead of an autocratic police state. Those of us on the left had to pretend that Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers weren’t huge jerks. For a while, we even had to pretend that Sarah Palin was a viable candidate for national office but luckily that wore off fairly quickly.

But forget about all that - 2008 was a great year for ME!

I opened the year by spending two weeks in Vietnam, and it was GREAT! Interesting cities, wonderful scenery and exciting adventures! Plus we got to meet with Vietnamese art students for a day, and even though we didn’t speak the same language, our artistic exchange proved that some things really are universal!

I then spent a semester in London, which was BY FAR my best semester! I’ve always been an Anglophile, and so I loved the chance to immerse myself in the local culture! (British people are so different!) By the end, I was going “down to the pub” for a “pint” and feeling like a local! I also came out of it with a feature screenplay! HOLLYWOOD HERE I COME!

I thought the summer would be a letdown, but even it turned out pretty awesome! With my friends I wrote a one-act play that premiered on a rooftop and then later collaborated on a musical that played in Central Park! Between my a quality summer internship and work as a summer RA, I even had time to visit Canada! For a wedding! Double bonus!

And if I didn’t think anything could top London, than this fall came pretty close! I wrote a second feature (not as good as the first, but it does have some hilarious montages!) and sketches for I pilot I’m shooting this spring! I worked two jobs which were very enjoyable and sort of almost got PAID for them!

I also spent the least amount of time yet single (10 months!) and wrote the most traffic’d article in BoDB history! It’s been a great year! Go me!