2011, a year of Anamnesis and Erudition

While trying to come up with a title for my year-end blog, I was thinking of a way to sum up my year in two to three words. After consulting Dictionary.com I came up with anamnesis and erudition.

Anamnesis means the recollection or rememberance of the past. This past year has been one of great anamnesis for me. I've had some pretty huge events happen to me this year. Most notably, my dad passing on March 19th. 

I am a person that is prone to reflectiveness naturally. My dad's death has made me more reflective then I've ever been before. Combine that with your usual male psyche of turning 30 and realizing that, "Yes, indeed YOU are now 30." Which leads to why I chose the word anamnesis as one of my descriptions of this past year.

Each holiday, certain beers, certain songs, corny jokes, and random intoxicated nights have brought on memory's of my dad. I would be drinking one of our homebrews and it would cause me to think of stories he would tell when we'd be brewing. For instance one of the many, "So we (Marine Corp Marching Band) were marching in this parade in _____ and we were so drunk......" hahaha. Those stories would usually bring a story or two out of me as well. Holiday's with family we would sit around and start talking about dad and grandpa as well.

When it comes to his passing at this point, I'm doing alright. It still hurts, and I still get sad from time to time, but I figure that's where I should be. He was a fun guy, even when making jokes about fungi. He had his moments, just like every other person. All in all, I learned a lot from him and he was a great dad!

I've also learned a lot in an academic sense this year too. Which brings us to the meaning of erudition. Erudition is knowledge acquired by study, research, etc.; learning; scholarship. 

I started going back to school, again, at the begining of this year. I didn't start off very strongly. Procrastinated at the start, partly because I was taking all online classes and forgot that I was in school. I'm a dummy sometimes. Once I started to get my act together a bit in mid March, my dad died which caused me to totally derail myself from staying on track. I ended up only passing one of my three classes that semester. 

After explaining my situation to my teachers and apologizing for not communicating better with them, I started fresh for the fall semester. To which I screwed around some more. Got back on track a bit, then fell back off track. Then the last month and a half of the semester I got my act back together.

I learned so much about computer networking and how the Internet works as a network. I can confidentally fix peoples networking problems now, haha! 

All this studying also caused anamnesis as well. Looking back to my history with computers and technology. It also helped me realize what I was looking at when I was teaching myself HTML when I was 14 and learning how to bypass protocol's on the MPS network. I was totaly fumbling around then. If my 14 year old self would have actually understood what I was looking at, I would have done a lot more damage, and I totally would have turned into a hacker. So I guess it's good that I didn't. haha

There has been a lot of other things that have happened this year, but most of those have been posted about on facebook, or I've talked about in other ways. Plus, this is more of a "What do you think of this past year" type of blog. 

So there you have it!