happy new year...seriously

One week ago I sat in an Ash Wednesday service at my church, Mountainside Communion in Monrovia, and I felt sad. Yes, the somber nature of the event was undoubtedly influential in my realization of this emotion, and the solemnity of Jesus’ incomparable sacrifice might have had something to do with it too, but, moreover, I was sad because, for the first time, surrounded by fellow church members, it fully occurred to me just how much I was going to miss being a part of that community.

You see, I’ve moved. For two whole days now I’ve named the residence of my dear parents, Wes and Nancy Janssen, my own. And this would be a largely positive thing were it not for the miserably unconquerable detail that they, indeed, live neither in Azusa nor in any of the neighboring cities in the San Gabriel Valley nor even in Los Angeles County, for that matter. They live (and I, too, now) in San Diego. Which is too far from my former and beloved roommate, too far from the overwhelming majority of those I call my friends, and generally outside the feasible realm of consistent Sunday commuting to my (former…sigh) church.

The move wasn’t heavily premeditated. And the actual date and time of the moving quite spontaneously selected, the hastiness of it all merely a reflection of my pesky bank account’s ever-increasing pressure on me to find a job. The move came, strangely enough, almost exactly one year to date from my decision, as a recently college-graduated young adult, to leave the nest for what I then assumed would be once-and-for-all and pursue the lifestyle of a fully independent young professional.

As the story goes, I was sometimes miserable in this situation, but mostly incredibly happy. I hated the job that I got. It was demanding and stressful and in no way remotely related to anything I wanted to be doing with my life. But I had a lot of freedom. And I had a conglomeration of my peers close by, however much my recent emancipation from the local educational community acted as a barrier to my feeling completely at home there. Thanks to my unsatisfying job, I was able to save up enough money to spend the whole summer relaxing and accomplished a notable feat in the completion of my first novel. No matter how depressed I might work myself up to feel about the fact that I’m still not in graduate school or at least somewhere abroad, comically struggling to adjust to the affectations of a foreign culture, I cannot deny this: 2007 was significant.

It has taken me a while to come around to this optimistic conclusion, and so I think it might be an appropriate time to start pinning a similarly positive expectation on 2008. Altogether, I find it hard to believe that I will finish up the year still living with my parents. I still have that jocularly cavalier New Year’s resolution that I now suppose I ought to make an effort to live up to: to live in Japan. And there was that sad but knowing look my former boss gave me when I told her I was quitting and she responded affectionately that she always knew I wouldn’t be a long-term employee.

I’m going to do exciting things this year. The world is my goddamn oyster and—sitting on a guestroom bed surrounded by the redecorated remnants of a room I used to call my own—I can’t say that I’ve ever believed it more. It’s not as though God gave me a mind and body that could be content working ad infinitum in a job that requires no more than a bachelor’s degree and my drudgingly apathetic loyalty. I think I genuinely like life; the logical response would be for me to live it.