More things I've learnt in 2006:

Alrighty. Am back home now (putting the NUI back into WANGAN! Yeah!!) and thanks to my boy genius little lil brother, am lounging in a toasty bed, enjoying the joys of joyful wireless interweb...

• Making friends is easy. Even with girls! Losing a friend is hard.
• Trust me on this on: choc-covered cashews. Don't imagine they're roasted/salted and then dunked in milk chocolatey goodness, as I first did - they're more like an uber-delicious version of the passe scorched almond.
• Office politics is just office politics. Because you spent a majority of your time in there, it seems like the world orientates around it, but you can leave on Friday, start somewhere new on Monday, and find the world spinning on a whole new axis. A much more stable one.
• Skinny jeans! Didn't think I'd go there, but now I'm all about tucking em into those boots.
  
• I have been poleaxed by grief this year. Even with some advance warning of Sam's illness, I still completely underestimated how unequivocal the impact of his death would be. A month or so ago, walking past Floridita's, I caught a glimpse of someone inside I thought for a second was him. Then I did the double-take and thought, "Nah, can't be him". And then I thought, "Of course not. Not Sam. Never Sam again. We've had that taken away from us. The chance to randomly bump into him happily in the wrong city on Sunday night. Get that in your head, Bel." So then I'm crying in the doorway of a closed shop on Cuba St, feeling cheated, lonely for my Hamilton friends despite the great crew I have down here, praying for his family, as my pain must just be a sliver of theirs.
• Music I have fallen in love with past twelve months: CocoRosie, Regina Spektor, M. Ward, Beirut, Lily Allen, Immortal Technique, the Tropical Downbeat Orchestra, Frontline, Shaky Hands, Over The Atlantic, Eagles of Death Metal, Kings of Leon, Interpol.
  
• When you get trained up on Ticketek systems as part of your new job, the guy teaching you everything will be able to open up your account and show you exactly how much you've spent on tickets for the NZ Intl Film Festival in total and this amount will horrify you.
• Susceptible to cute.
• Maybelline Great Lash (that classic green & pink one) is still the best mascara out.
• A lot of the time, the upsetting/aggressive/untoward things that people say to you have nothing to do with you but are actually about them and their headspace. Sometimes its really hard to keep this in mind when things are delivered in such a personal way, but its been so important for my own stability this year to deflect a certain amount of what I've decided is their baggage.
• Ask the restaurant staff what their favourite dish is. So the best way to find out what the true specials are. And I've wound up being tempted to trying things I wouldn't usually, which is great because I tend to just get overwhelmed by the big gorgeous list of words that a menu is.
  

Okay, well the pain of being busting to go for a wee has now gotten worse than the aching of my foot. Am going to wail until big lil brother comes to my rescue and lets me lean on him while I hobble in slow motion to the bathroom... I've become very demanding and high maintenance as a result of this incapacitation - ahem - not that you'd notice!