This year on my birthday, a good friend of our family's pulled me aside during the festivities and said, "Annie, this is going to be your year, before your 24th birthday (Sept. 3rd, 2012) God told me he has something special in store for you--and it's what you've been waiting for." Now, while it might seem odd to you that our family friend referenced God--it isn't, she's a minister and she has a propensity for talking to God. Now, you can think what you will about that, but I actually took a great amount of comfort in those words. This year I'm going to have what I've been waiting for.
I guess the only question left is, "what am I waiting for?" Well I've certainly been waiting to look like Heidi Klum and I've been waiting to finally figure out what it is I'm supposed to do with my life--merely commenting sarcastically on the lives of those around me cannot be my true calling. So I've been thinking a lot about what our minister friend said to me, and I still don't have an answer. I will tell you, however, that thinking about those words gets me through the days when someone screams lewdly at me from a car window as I leave my lunch break destination or a sixth-grade girl who should be worrying about getting Auntie Anne's pretzels tells me her boyfriend (which Lord knows she shouldn't have) is "beef tenderloin". Beef-fucking Tenderloin (This will be my year.)
While this seems counter-intuitive, the last time I really felt like it was "my year", was my senior year of High School when I quit the cheerleading team. I know, it shouldn't be a good thing to quit, but I was so damn proud, I even wrote that in my college-entrance essay. I think I intended it to come off as witty and original, but I'm sure I just sounded like an insane person with a poor work-ethic. Surely one of the best qualities in someone is their ability to dig in their heels when things get tough? But as I wrote on my college entrance essay, the theme of which was something I had done that made me proud, I started out by writing, "I'm a quitter, and that's the thing of which I am most proud." Literal sentence. Weirdly, MIT turned me down.
In my essay, I went on to explain, that when I quit the cheerleading team, I realized that I was actually doing something really gutsy, in that I realized it was only to uphold some bizarre notion of who I was supposed to be--and that it was making me miserable. I also threw in a little "Big Fat Greek Wedding" action, saying I had always wished I was someone who could sit with the popular girls at their lunch table in the elementary school cafetorium, chic with a wonder bread sandwich, instead of being the "smart kid" in the corner reading young adult fiction about the Holocaust and pounding a fluffer-nutter bagel. Those were not my years.
Since my senior year of high school, however, I've continued to quit a lot of things, one of the most important being that I stopped trying to be popular and blonde (two things I will never be) and instead settled into being the sarcastic asshole with brown hair (brown--why don't we call it yellow-hair instead of blonde? They already have too much going for them, let's level this semantical playing field) and a mouth that would make John McEnroe blush (actual thing I said to my parents at dinner when recounting a girl pointing out her Coach bag to me, "Oooh cool, you have a Coach purse? What do you want me to do, lick your twat?").
I had a beer with my friend tonight, and she has decided to be a quitter too, and thank God, because really that's the only way I think this will be her year. But I'm confident it will be.
So, I'm re-reading this, and while it is sort of a departure for me to write about anything but Kardashians or why I can't cook, or my funny thoughts on weird people I meet--(I feel a little bit like getting this personal is like stripping naked in the middle of the shopping mall) I wanted to affirm to myself that this will be my year. And I think it will "the year" for a lot of other people in my life. Here's to the quitters--it's our year.
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