For me, there was something weird about getting ready for my first Halloween out of college.  It wasn't just that I wasn't going to be spending one of my favorite holidays surrounded by the people that I had been celebrating with for four years, though that was a factor.  I was just not as fully prepared as I had been in the past.

After my friend Zach finished his internship this summer, he was unemployed for six weeks.  During those six weeks, he did a lot of activities, most notably one of which was finding an amazing job in NYC, but on more than one occasion, it was texting me that he was eating both pizza and pasta for breakfast.  In addition to eating meals with inappropriate amounts of carbs, Zach also spent an inordinate amount of time posting Buzzfeed articles on my Facebook wall.  He posted articles on my wall so frequently with such relentless dedication and about topics that ranged from mild to disturbingly inappropriate that it caused my mother to think we were in love, which is hilarious because Zach is actually in love with her.

In early October, I decided to make a return to Muncie for Homecoming and after having an extended conversation with a man who claimed to be a 1976 Ball State graduate, but that my friend Lillie insisted was actually a very dirty Muncie local, I made my way up to the bar to grab a drink.

Very recently, one of the nicest things that has ever happened to me, happened.  I was in my room packing for my trip to Indiana (i.e., laying on my bed, realizing I only own one pair of matching socks), when I received a text from one of my favorite humans, Andy Meyer.

The Prandato family has had three cats in the past 15 years and it has become clear that one thing is for certain: we are terrible cat owners.

I distinctly remember the first time I remember hearing the "F Word."  I phrase it that way because I was in third grade the first time I remember hearing it and I'm pretty sure that it's highly improbable I made it through eight years of life without hearing it at least a handful of times.  This hypothesis is based mostly on an incident that I have no recollection of, when my mother, brother and I, recent New York transplants to northern Idaho, witnessed a moose running through our backyard.  When re-telling the story to my father, my mom said "There was a moose outside today!" and three-year-old Jonny stated, "No, Mommy, it's not JUST a moose. You said it was a F*CKING moose!"  It's a family-favorite story that very accurately depicts our drastic life decision to move to Idaho, but like I said, I have no memory of that moment.

The moment I realized I had fallen in love happened in a way that many modern love stories nowadays do.

It happened on Tinder.

Immediately after I graduated college, people kept asking me how it felt.  "How does it feel to be graduated?  How does it feel to be unemployed?  How does it feel that you're required to be a real-life adult now?"

Before I begin, I have to say that this is hands down the most embarrassing blog post I've ever written -- which, really, is saying a lot considering I've included stories about dropping my Jimmy John's sandwich behind the store's stove, accidentally washing all of my clothing in oil, crying on the Fourth of July in England because the KFC rolls were too good and, of course, when I did this:

When my family moved to Massachusetts three years ago, we bought a house that was much too large for us.  More specifically, the yard was too large: every week, it takes a full day for my father to mow/garden/weed/whatever it is that people do to keep yards looking acceptable.  Because my brothers and I had grown up in a house confined by a fence and also because we knew absolutely no one in Marshfield after moving from Idaho, we spent most of that summer exploring our yard.  We didn't find much: besides an old chicken coop and an abandoned tire swing, our findings in the backyard only led to us finding empty spaces to put our slack-line and hammock.  

One thing that I've learned about writing is that it's hard for me to motivate myself to formulate complete thoughts on my blog posts.  On the back end of my website, I have at least twenty drafts of stories I want to tell that I haven't found the correct words for them to be completed.  There's empty posts with titles -- "Hats," "The Bird Funerals," "Home Is Whenever I'm With You," -- posts with loosely formed ideas that I don't yet possess the correct words to tell the full story.  

We were finishing out our sophomore year at the same place it started: our friend Ian’s house.  This time was different, though.  Instead of the raging parties that Ian usually had, there were only a select few of us at the house.  By that point, most people had already gone home for the summer.  Actually, to be completely honest, even Ian had already left Muncie, but he had the type of house that was “open-invitation” for his friends.  (He also had the type of house that, at one point in the middle of that year, did not have any functional working doors, so in order to get in and out of the house, you’d have to climb through either the front or back window.  It was the definition of a college party house and I can literally feel my mother’s horror at reading those last few sentences).

Sometimes, when I tell my roommates stories about my day, they look at me with a mix of surprise and horror at the fact that they live with someone who ends up in such a vast amount of uncomfortable situations.  

Whenever I travel, I always have three items: Puglee, my Five Year Diary and "The Manifesto."  Granted, I usually have a plethora of other things as well, but at this point, I would bet that it is physically impossible for me to get on a plane without knowing these three items are in my carry-on.  While I'm a firm believer in the fact that material objects should have a low ranking in the scheme of life, I am attached to these three things beyond belief and they are, each for their own reason, my favorite items that I own.

While I firmly believe that in the future, I will refer to 2013 as "The Year I Sprained My Ankle So Many Times That My Left Foot Couldn't Fit In My Boots Anymore," it was also a year of wonderful experiences, new opportunities and incredible memories.  I definitely think I was able to become a better, stronger person than I was in 2012 and here are thirteen things I learned that helped me get there.