thoughtfulPersonally, I found it pretty embarrassing - the only point I really feature is kissing Rose (my fairly new girlfriend at the time), out of character, at a guild night - in a fairly over-the-top, PDA kind of way. Now, while there's nothing I'd take back about my time with Rose, I have grown up enough since then to realise that it wasn't exactly acceptable public behaviour, and I feel kind of bad about it.
Anyway, it got me thinking about that year in general. I'd pretty much settled into university, and gotten used to the course not challenging me, which set me up for a bit of a fall towards the tail end of the year's exams, when the material began to get harder. So I didn't really get a lot done in terms of my course, aside from being one of about 3-5 people who got my group project any marks at all. At LARP, I spent a lot of my reffing time on damage control, as some of the whole ref team at the time was pretty inexperienced and badly informed (me included) and some of the players were out to dominate the system. I suppose that was fairly worthwhile.
I was also still quite low on self-esteem at the start of the year, depressive at times, and over the course of the year as I got used to not being able to mentally place myself on the bottom of the social dogpile, my ego got pretty swollen now and again. I'd seen it happen to a couple of friends before, so I think that I checked it earlier than I might have otherwise, which made it less far to fall when I realised I was being an arsehole every so often.
I did have a lot of fun that year - hanging out with
space_gargoyle, Lil, Michelle, rosabella, Chris sometimes when he came to visit, and others, drinking at RocSoc, running some sweet adventures and some poor ones, working for Josh etc. but there's nothing there that I can look back on and say "that was the year I achieved x, and it will stay with me for the rest of my life".More to the point, there are a few things from that year that I'm less than proud of - conversations with people, growing elitism, heavy alcohol use and the aforementioned lack of respect for other people in public are just the ones that come to mind.
This morning I was quite down about it all, and apprehensive about returning to the town that brought it about. However, after watching old video-game cartoons this evening with friends from work this evening, I feel quite a lot better. I'm a different, wiser (I hope) person than I was then, I have so many positive aspects to my life right now (much of which is courtesy of
longpig) and the changes I've made should hold pretty firm. 