The Recess... (welcome to the alcoves of my mind)

I never look back dahling, it distracts from the now...

Well I must say, since my exam on Dec 19 (and lets face it, most of the time before that) I've had a delightfully uneventful holiday. After a long semester full of late nights, early mornings and a pretty busy day inbetween, I had almost forgotten the merits of being a bump on a log. I can safely say in the last three weeks I have contributed absolutely nothing to society, and I harbour no remorse about it. It's been friggin' awesome.

But enough about my recent uselessness. Tomorrow (which comes in about 20 minutes, actually), marks the last day of 2005, and as I had hoped, this past year was a vast improvement over the one that preceeded it. Nothing much spectacular happened, but after dealing with two deaths, my mom getting skin-cancer, me getting mono, a bad break-up and a move in 2004, no news was most definitely good news.

I'm looking forward to 2006, mostly because it seems like it's going to be the first year of the rest of my life. I graduate in little over four months, getting the degree I've wanted since I was 13 years old. I know that getting a bachelor degree is pretty standard stuff these days, but I'm still really proud that I got through the program. If nothing else, I learned that this is most definitely what I want to do with my life. The details or my future career still have to be worked out, but nevertheless I've narrowed it down to the realm of "writing stuff and getting paid for it," which is good enough for now :).

Spring 2006 will hopefully bring about some choice. I've decided to apply for a journalism masters program in Denmark, not as much for the degree as it would be for the chance to study internationally. And as far as internationalism goes, this program means business. One semester in Aarhus, Denmark studying globalization; one semester in Amsterdam, Holland studying international politics; and a year in either Germany or the UK studying business, communications or war-reporting. I decided (out of pure academic interest, don't worry people) to put the war-reporting program in Whales as my first choice, and the communications program in Hamburg as my second.

If I don't get into the Erasmus Mundus program, I'll be spending the remainder of 2006 in Ottawa, working and saving for a year abroad in New Zealand come January 2007. I don't have a preference for one over the other, though if I open the masters box, it will not only be a helluva lot more expensive, but will make it harder and harder for me to resist the urge of doing a Ph.D. I don't want to be in school for the next six years, but if I do a masters, it seems silly not to go all the way.

New Zealand, on the other hand, will obviously be the adventure of a lifetime. Trekking around the other side of the world, meeting tons of people and hopefully finding things out about myself that I never knew before. Barring any unforeseen disasters, it seems in 2006, I can't lose. Keep your fingers crossed ;).

posted by Megan at 11:33 p.m.