2006: Year in Review

As much as I’m glad to celebrate the New Year, I hate to see that 2006 has come to an end. Exactly 365 days ago, I was laying next to my then-girlfriend-now-fiancé in her home state of Washington watching how drunk Seattle news reporters ring in the New Year atop the Giant Prick (a.k.a. Space Needle). I was jobless, depressed and down on my luck, and even though I was to fly back to Chicago in a few days, I really wondered if coming back was truly the right thing to do.

It didn’t take very long to see whether or not the craptacularity was going to carry over into 2006. A week after coming back, I received word that Ed had gone missing. After searching his place for clues and discovering that the WrestleMania 22 shirt that I gave him and a Chuck Palahniuk book that I loaned him were missing, I felt comforted in a sick and perverse sort of way at the thought that those items could be his last worldly possessions before he was raped, killed and raped again Katie Vick style before being dismembered and eaten by a pack of hungry werewolves horny for some shit-brickin’ mud-butt flesh. On the other hand, my worries of his disappearance were deepened further by the discovery of his hockey stick. Oh Ed… you should have known that the hockey stick would not only have made a great weapon in self-defense against werewolves, but would have also given you better stability in preventing another dislocated knee or twisted ankle running away from said werewolves in the middle of some the meanest and scariest Wisconsin woods. In retrospect, Ed never was in any real danger, and the best thing that came out of that night was a free dinner courtesy of his uncle.

In February, I flew out to Tennessee to hang out with Carl and Eric for our annual Super Bowl outing which is now the longest running tradition among friends. The trip started out well – sight-seeing in Nashville and a tour of the Jack Daniels distillery – but took a turn after I literally hit rock bottom and fell into a river. Camera!

No matter how shitty the year was going so far, the one thing that kept my spirits up was WrestleMania at the end of March. Next to the Olympics and World Cup, WrestleMania is probably the next biggest global phenomenon out there, and I was glad to be a part of it sitting ringside along with three of my closest wrasslin buddies and the people from around the world that we met there.

March also marked my return to the workforce. After working at several big name organizations since coming out of school a few years ago, I could honestly say that I’ve finally found my niche in the workplace.

One of the things that I’ve always wanted to do was spend a week driving cross-country from one end of the United States to the other. In July, I came close to doing that, driving across two-thirds of the country from Washington State back to Chicago. After doing the drive through the most boring parts of the U.S., I don’t think I want to drive cross-country anymore.

A month later, Cathy and I made it to our vacation spot, the San Juan Islands. A beautiful sunset along the Pacific Ocean, I couldn’t ask for a better time and place to propose than right at that moment.

And the rest is pretty much history. 2006 started out rough, but things smoothed out eventually. It was a memorable year and hopefully there will be more good times to come in 2007. Happy New Year!