I really miss having a handy list of everything I’ve seen and read in a year, it makes filling out my wishlist on Amazon so much easier, but holy this has been the craziest year of my life in years. I started out the year having just barely started anti-depression meds, no clue if I was going to be able to get my applications for grad school in on time, and my country decided to put its foot in its mouth, shoot the foot, and then set themselves on fire for good measure.
Since the beginning of the year, I think the country is still on fire and the fire is turning out to be a toxic sludge hot mess but my personal life is going better, kinda?
Kinda since I did lose two grandparents within about three months of each other (fuck you) and I’ve spent about the last month either growling at all of my papers or literally flopping around on the floor going “nope, don’t wanna write more strategic plans, doooooooooon WANNA”.
But I got into my first choice for grad school, heck I got in before I even applied for the second so heck yeah saving admission costs money! I seem to be on track to get fairly good grades in all three of my classes and I even got a graduate assistantship which means I work a bit for my university and they pay me a small stipend, give me healthcare, and give me tuition remission. My living costs went up when I moved nearer to my new school, and who the fuck knows what's going to happen to my taxes with that tax bill (swear to god if y'all tax me on $30,000 a year I literally don't even get I will set something large on fire) so I’m still treading water for money but I’m not drowning and at this point stand a good chance at getting out of both undergrad and grad school debt free!
So as you can see, school has been on my mind a lot lately, although even before school started in August I clearly wasn’t posting as much. My anti-depressant REALLY kicked in in February after I had been on it for a few months (I felt like I was waking up and had no idea how long I’d been “asleep”) but once I got my acceptance letter at the end of February I really had to hustle to make several drastic changes to my life and that ate up my time/energy that I’d use for blogging.
I’ve still been doing manga reviews fairly regularly over at the OASG and the plan is to continue doing one or two reviews a week there for the foreseeable future. I’m still trying to figure out how I want to approach blogging here going forward; I simply don’t have the time to make as many posts as I used to but I like having a set schedule which is hard when I don’t know how much material I’ll have on hand to talk about next week or the week after. I think it’s most likely that I’ll switch to a weekly round-up post format, a la Ash over at Experiments in Manga, but give me a bit more time to work out the kinks for that.
Currently the plan IS to participate in the 12 Days of Anime Blogging however! Hopefully I get to all 12 days this year like I have in some past years, and I’m looking forward to all of the other, surely excellent, posts my ani-blogging friends are making so let’s get to it starting tomorrow!
