How I spent New Year's

That's relatively simple.
Chatting all night with my best friend.
That really doesn't SOUND like a great Near Year's Eve plan, and we didn't plan on it, but that's what we did.
She was working on her 8-page comic submission to the Scholastic Contest that day, and I was working on my writing. She sent me a text, affectionate as usual, with the message Go on gm. I go on Gmail to find her agonizing over how she does the face. I spend the next hour and a half critiquing it and making her experiment with eye sizes before we actually had any real conversation. Then we started talking.
First, as will happen with most high schoolers, about college. We both have different types of worries. Hers: CalArts accepts only 53 students a year for character animation. She wants to be one of those people next year. She's working hard to make sure she is, but she's not sure if she'll be good enough on time.
Mine: I had shitty grades from freshman-sophomore year. Didn't care. Went to U of C Open House. Cares alot. Now: Working hard for good grades, but worries its not enough. Also, trying to write more and more (like thorugh this blog) but not producing tangible results (for example: I've only finished one short story this year)
So we shared our worries, drawing our conversation out from college stress to middle school memories (Spoiler: Most of them are bad) to our hometowns. Or rather, our homecountries.
My best friend is Indian. She moved to Illinois when she was in 3rd or 4th grade, but she remembers.
I'm Syrian, but I've never lived there for more than two months at a time during the summers of my childhood. This is because my parents got the hell out of there when they could, but they still loved their family back there. So all my mom's siblings (Three out of her four siblings) and their kids went to my grandmas' house every year to hang out for a couple of months.
She told me about how her cousins pranked her by dropping a rubber spider on her skin in the middle of the night, and I told her about Little Village, the private school turned summer school that I made friends in.
Here's the really interesting thing both of our stories would share in common:
We always belonged. Our families were our friends, our cousins like siblings. My mom told me how when she was younger, she used to hang out with her family over the weekend as her social life. Both my best friend and I, isolated from our family thanks to differing self-interests, had lost that kinship that is so sacred in the East. In America, it's not the same. Our extended family aren't our friends, they are people we meet up with every year. And in my family, not even that because of the distance. I haven't seen most of my cousins in real life in two years. That's what I spend New Year's Eve doing. Talking about the past with my best friend.
Happy New Year's everyone.
As for resolutions, I've always made my own resolutions before New Years's that I plan to continue enacting and getting started on the next year regardless. Main ideas: Run a mile in ten minutes, write everyday, only use Tumblr on the weekends, get good grades first semester of 2013, and do my sister well before she graduates.
Sayanoraz