Numbered: 2017

Ah, the New Year, when so many lists are being made. Lists of resolutions, lists of intentions, lists of foods not to be touched, lists of what was great about the previous year. If your Instagram feed was anything like mine, the last few weeks featured many "Best Nine" photo collages. If your Instagram feed was really anything like mine, most of those revolved around engagements and weddings. 2017 was a big year for all of my mid-twenties friends, and I have been blessed to share in some of their joy.

2017 was my favorite of recent years. It was the first year since college I truly felt like myself, felt valuable and valued, had work I loved, and made serious steps towards some personal goals. Yet, despite having such positive feelings, until this moment I couldn't compel myself to make a Best Nine collage. No, it didn't have anything to do with a lack of a diamond. It maybe had something to do with a lack of time; if I'm being hopeful, with too much of a focus on Advent (hm, maybe a stretch). Regardless, today I found myself four days into 2018, and I, a lover of lists, had yet to participate in putting my year into nine tight bullet points. So I did it; I made my Instagram account public for one hot minute to produce the collage you see here. These were wonderful memories of my past year, but 2017 was so much more than nine filtered and cropped images that received the most likes. It was a year of concepts and feelings and moments and more. Why should I limit myself to summarizing my year into the box Instagram designed for me? No, I choose words over pictures and popularity. So, in addition to these pictured moments, here we go, some Best Nines of 2017:

Best Nine Moments of Success:

1. Getting my Persuasion article for Acculturated tweeted out by Penguin Random House Publishing. If you missed it, read it here.
2. Working as a Wedding Coordinator, culminating in cutting the cake
3. Moving a woman to tears during my Susan B. Anthony story
4. Being recognized by a family visiting Dickens Village from my work as a Once Upon A Nation Storyteller
5. Hosting 6 parties, two of which Cerise and I fully catered (and created recipes for!)
6. Going out of my comfort zone by going on dates
7. Finally registering for a parish and getting involved in my church community
8. Completing Caren's Philly bucket list, including standing in line for Pizzeria Beddia TWICE 
9. Managing to not use corporal punishment on children at after school care 

Best Nine Moments with Others:

1. Eating pizza on Independence Mall at night with coworkers
2. Watching Sarah and Patrick cry the whole way through their wedding
3. Sweating, eating, and drinking on the roof with my family to watch the Eclipse at the beach
4. Eating pie and laying on Caren's nearly-empty apartment floor with the Rosen-gals after our last dinner at Rex 1516.
5. Sipping cocktails on the nets at Spruce Street Harbor Park with Emily
6. Singing and dancing at concerts, especially Mumford and Sons in the rain and Dierks Bentley
7. Road tripping to Bryan and Samara's wedding
8. Cheesing in all the photo booth photos at Alyssa and Joe's engagement party
9. Having nowhere to be and nothing to do on Christmas day but play games and eat food with my parents

Best Nine Memorable Quotes or Lyrics:

1. "Let us, like Mary, find happiness in our nothingness, take pride in our state of empty longing, waiting in silent trust." - Sr. Ruth Burrows
2. "Help me to accept the life you have prepared for me, with its difficulties and its mysterious joys." (Read my blog post on this one here.)
3. "Virtue is an excellent thing and we should all strive after it, but it can sometimes be a little depressing." - Excellent Women by Barbara Pym
4. "My mind may be completely absorbed in the business at hand. And yet there is something I have observed in souls who are extremely busy, and who yet never cease to live and breathe in you. And that is what I want to arrive at, in the course of even my most absorbing work." - Dom Jean-Baptiste Chautard
5. "I've got your memory / Or, has it got me? / I really don't know / But I know, it won't let me be." - She's Got You sung by Rhiannon Giddens; listen here
6. "That mankind is called is not some remote reality, something for certain privileged individuals...Calling is basic to our very identity as human persons." - Fr. Jacques Philippe
7. "I fed you fables and fooled you with words from my tongue / Trying to make you think I was a better man than I was / But if you're asking me now to tell you the truth / It's getting harder and harder to lie to you." - Harder to Lie sung by David Ramirez; listen here
8. "Consequently mutual understanding is impossible so long as you have not first settled on the meaning of words." - From the Kippah to the Cross by Jean-Marie Elie Setbon
9. "Shocking! And so un-ladylike!" - HPI Story Strolls

I could go on. Best Nine Meals, Best Nine Failures, Best Nine Karaoke Songs...But I won't. I've probably bored you already with too many words. Maybe that's why Instagram keeps it to a nice tight nine photos that it knows the public already likes. Maybe none of it - pictures or words - really matters to anyone except the one posting it. All I know is that I just had a wonderful time reflecting on 2017 and the hardest time narrowing it down to even these 27 things. All I know is I am truly and ridiculously thankful and blessed.

Happy New Year, everyone.

The aim of my new category, Numbered, is to explore and possibly deconstruct the style and content of lists which are so popular on many blog and social media platforms. This enterprise is part of my Melville experiment, which you can read about here.