How do you measure, measure a year?*

Have you used the See Your 2012 Year in Review application that Facebook recently launched? I saw it just yesterday, somewhere in between all these status updates regarding the 12/12/12 coincidence –an honest thank you to all my friends who felt the need to remind me. I’m not really into checking my calendar every day, so can you please keep doing it every day?

Anyway, time to get back to my starting point. Always a curious child overloaded with memories and homesickness (less than ten days left and then back to Athens!) I clicked and waited, only to be disappointed a few moments later. The 20 biggest moments of my 2012 involved people wishing me “Happy Birthday” in bulk, photos from my summer vacation and personal status updates that happened to get lots of Likes.

So I was like “Huh? That’s all?” Don’t get me wrong, I’d happily exchange all my shoe collection in order to relive these moments – or at least make sure I’ll remember them forever (Alzheimer’s disease runs in the family), but when you say highlights, I don’t remember any of them recorded in Facebook:

Family dinners, for instance. Or lunches, or breakfasts, or even coffee breaks. Maybe it relates to the fact that I’ve missed my mom’s cooking. In family meals friends are more than welcome and food is always more than abundant.

The feeling of cold water on my skin while diving in the sea after endless hours of sunbathing. It is a shock, relief and pleasure at the same time, especially when you have the chance to spend your vacation in Kikladhes, one of my favorite destinations (the photo below makes it quite clear why).

Book and movie hangovers. That happens every time a book or a movie that I enjoyed reading/ watching comes to its end and I’m so overwhelmed by happy feelings that I can’t focus on anything else. Lately, I get so easily bored while watching a movie –Facebook and bloglovin’ are also terrible distractions, as well- so watching the end without having clicked on fast forward about twenty times plays a very important role. I can recall having watched the first half of “One Day” (starring Anne Hathaway) and grumbling (to the friend that suggested it to me) about how I found it too depressing and pointless and that I was thinking of not watching the rest. However, somehow he persuaded me to do so and I ended up loving the movie. Just try imagining my movie hangover afterwards.

Inappropriately loud laughs and non-sense girl-talks in the middle of the night while  munching cookies, spitting water melon seeds (that was not very lady-like to share, but it happens sometimes) or licking nutella off kitchen utensils.

Cheesy pick up lines. Last spring I met a particularly handsome guy at a conference. Knowing that I would probably never see him again, I wrote “Call me maybe” and my phone number in a note and asked a friend to hand it over to him. Crazy, I know. But it worked! Of course I was inspired by the song title, which at the time wasn’t as famous –or should I say infamous?- as it is now, but if you had seen this video you wouldn’t be so eager to judge me!

 F.