I want to preface this that everything I write here may leave you scratching your head thinking “this is not unusual at all”. But it is for me.

I, like most people belong to different groups of friends, that function as bubbles. I have my online friends, my church friends, my friends from drawing class, my friends with whom I do free hugs every month and so on. And by far and large, these groups do not interact with each other at all, and that’s partly on me. For whatever reason that I still need to work out with a therapist, I (sub)consciously keep these groups separate.

I think that is at least partly because I behave in slightly different ways, show different parts of myself to these different groups. Again, this mostly normal, and a ton of people do this, but I also know people who, by far and large don’t do this, and furthermore they have no trouble whatsoever with their bubbles meeting – for them, they are not even bubbles.

Therefore a couple of years ago I decided to turn my birthday party into a social experiment: invite everyone from everywhere into one big party, and just see what happens. It was legitimately scary for me because, in that setting, I have to be myself, my real self, I can’t do much pretending.

I am happy I did that because it was a huge success. I had about a dozen people from 3 or 4 different groups, and it was great to see them get to know each other.

This Saturday I’m having a party again, with an even more diverse group. It’s still scary, but now it’s exciting as well. I’m cooking some Mexican food, because as cliche as it is, food brings people together.

You’re all invited as long as you can make it to Hungary by 7 pm this Saturday. :)

Ten years ago I was working at a translation agency, being very enthusiastic about my job. I just started having a social life again after high school, finding real-life friends and community on Early Twitter, thanks to a Twitter client that auto-aggregated Hungarian users and connected them. (That’s a story worth telling in itself, another time)

A lot has happened since then. I worked there for a few more years, then I moved to Sweden for four years and then moved back to Hungary. Somewhere in the middle of that, I went freelance, which overall turned out to be a huge success. I started taking care of my mental health, getting diagnosed and re-diagnosed, finding a psychiatrist, did almost six years of therapy. I traveled a lot; I’ve been to most European countries by now as well as two trips to the US, both because of I got to be part of XOXO, but I’ve visited other parts of the States as well. I did a small pivot in my career that so far worked out well. I lost two out of my four grandparents. Built and ran a small link-sharing community. Grown a lot personally and professionally. Discovered running, did that for a few years. Found and lost friends and communities.

Right now I’m in a pretty great place. I have well-paying clients and hopefully picking up more freelance work soon. I’m part of a great church, one that I was looking for all my life. I have good friends, some old, some new. I’ve started drawing a few months ago, and I enjoy it immensely. Yesterday, after years of procrastination, I finally found myself a personal trainer and will begin working with her next week. Although my sister is moving out of our place, a good friend is taking her place in the room next to mine. I’m having a birthday party on Saturday where I’ll cook for my friends. I feel at home where I am.

Here’s to an even better 40.

I was planning to possibly dive into the YearCompass, I even put it on my todo list to print it out and take it with me to my favorite coffee shop, but I forgot to look at my todo list. Ah, the joys of ADHD. They do have a PDF that you can do electronically, but it’s not a great user experience.

I binged on the first season Condor yesterday, and I have to say it was a pretty fun spy thriller. I’m looking forward to Season 2.

Before that, I watched the first season of Impulse, which is, uh, I guess inspired by one of my favorite Sci-fi books, but they only took the fundamental concept of the book and made into a pretty good teen drama, with this season focusing primarily on sexual assault and its effects.

I got a kick out of the first season of Succession which is cut from the “despicable rich people prestige TV” genre (see also: Billions). Pretty much everyone in it terrible in their own different entertaining ways, with no real heroes and yet you find yourself rooting for people.

Do yourself a simple favor and check out A Simple Favor (sorry) if you haven’t seen it in the theaters: it was one of the most fun movies I saw in 2018. I hesitate to say anything about it as it is one of those movies that is best enjoyed going in knowing nothing about it; even stating its genre is a possible spoiler in my book, so you’re just gonna have to trust me on that one.

Oh, and the Big Fat Quiz of The Year 2018 is out, which is an annual TV event of mostly British comedians being funny while pretending to play a quiz. It has two-thirds of The IT Crowd and also Michelle Wolf, among others.

Onwards to 2019!

2018 was a strange year for me. I started it out sort of aimless, not knowing what to do professionally. Then, stealing a friend’s idea I simply put out a “Hey, I’m looking for a cool team to work with” message to social media and got a ton of different offers and I ended up with… a cool team to work with.

Since February I have essentially a very well-paid half-time job at a small but important hosting company as a sysadmin. I’m a generalist at heart but out of all the things I do, working with servers is probably my favorite bit and I feel privileged to do that once again.

I also continued to work with a few other clients on some ongoing projects, and I ended this year sending out a huge quote – one, if and if it works out, would keep me very busy in 2019, and that’d be great, so crossing fingers on that.

On a more personal note, I tried University this year and while I had some small victories, I pretty much dropped out already – It’s really not for me. And I knew that but I thought the prospect of having a degree and therefore better chances at immigration to the US would be motivating enough, but it really isn’t.

This year I also started drawing and it’s been fun! And I’ve also been to XOXO 2018, which was probably even better than 2016 and Portland already feels like a second home for me.

I didn’t plan to travel a lot this year and yet I count 10 (wow) different trips abroad, and most of these were for fun. I’ve been to Linz, Berlin, Gothenburg, Vienna, Amsterdam, San Francisco, Portland, Geneva, London.

I don’t really know yet what 2019 will bring. If the quote/job I mentioned above works out, I’ll be very busy, and that’s something I miss. If not… we’ll see.

Hey look, 300 words!