Comparisons

People like to label each year and section it off, like if we put it into a box and analyze its problems, we'll be better able to take on the future, like events and changes limit themselves to a three hundred and sixty-six day span. Now, I'm not knocking year-end reflections, because I think it's valuable- it’s like we as a society needed to schedule a planning period and this was the time we picked. I'm always in need of some planning, so I'm happy to go along with it.

For me, I think 2012 is going to be the year of the metaphor. I mean, it's only one of many kinds of year- it's a leap year, an election year, an Olympics year, the apocalypse year- but you have to make it personal, somehow, and this was the year that I discovered just how much I love metaphors. I mean, it also could have been the year of staying in places that weren't mine (between adventuring, house-sitting, and a job that requires you to be on the road half the month, I've been around), the year of fear (afraid of being a thorn in someone's side, afraid of pain, afraid of not having enough), or the year when I read Anna Karenina. But I think that 2012 is best defined as the year when I finished watching Friends ("It's like all of my life, everyone has always told me you're a shoe... And then today I just stopped and I said, What if I don't want to be a shoe? What if want to be a purse, you know, or a hat? No, I don't want you to buy me a hat, I'm saying that I am a hat- it's a metaphor, Daddy!"), the year when I read The Fault in Our Stars ("It's a metaphor, see: You put the killing thing right between your teeth, but you don't give it the power to do its killing."), and the year when I discovered the PBS Idea Channel ("Why does this guy insist that everything about internet culture is 100% the best? And come up with bad metaphors around it?" Because he's looking complexly at a huge section of today's society and linking it to big philosophical ideas. Duh. ). And now, since I've named it, I wanted to give you a list of metaphors about my life, but phrasing those proved to be challenging, so here's a list of similes for my life that I've discovered.

-Life is like my old computer. I got it in college and am consistently amazed at how it still works (not because of its quality, but because of sheer determination) , and how I still haven't completely replaced it with new technology.

- Life is like driving on a highway. There's a certain amount of pride that has to be squashed when you get passed while driving at a respectable speed, directions are occasionally difficult to come by or wrong, but the road's predictable enough that you can get by, and you can't always tell someone you've wronged that you're sorry. Also, you could die.

-Life is like snowflakes. Each one is unique because of the specific set of circumstances that it was formed in and traveled through to get to the ground. Plus, most of the snowflakes you see are conglomerations of individual snow crystals. When the crystals form, they start out as hexagonal prisms, and then the branches or arms form on the corners of the hexagonal prism, because that's the easiest place, and the crystal grows the way it does because it's easier to build on the existing arm than to make a new one. You never see a four or eight sided snowflake in nature, even though those are easier to make when you cut out paper snowflakes, unless the snowflake is deformed. Most of them are deformed, because journeying to the ground is difficult.

-Life is like searching for something on google. Sometimes it knows exactly what I want, because it's what everyone else wants too, and sometimes I can type in twenty different combinations of keywords without finding a thing because I can't for the life of me think of a different way to ask for something.

-Life is like getting a new phone. There was absolutely nothing wrong with my old one, but people kept on telling me to get a new one, and now I can't think how I functioned without it. Also, I'm surprised when people from purportedly third world countries have the same kind of phone I do, because you'd think that other things would get in the way.

-Life is like writing. To have any kind of confidence at all, you have to realize that when you speak with your own voice, it has a quality that no one else has, and you should be valued for that. Just because it's something that I would say said the way I would say it does not mean it is intrinsically bad. The contribution you're going to make is going to be unlike anything anyone else has made, even if tumblr has proven that there are hundreds if not thousands of people almost exactly like you, except with a weird affinity for squids.

-Life is like a literary comparison. It's difficult to understand, and it's never perfect.

Happy New Year! My New Years Resolution? Read 12 books. What about you?