A year ago I was generally happy but missing something.

A year ago I felt like most of my “buckets” were filled: my marriage bucket, my kid bucket, my friend bucket, and so on.

Side note: I’m really big on my “buckets.” Biiiig bucket guy here. I reference my buckets a lot. When I was 23 I remember crying to my mom, saying all of my buckets were filled except for my boyfriend bucket. Then some cocky fella named Barton Simmons tweeted me his phone number on Twitter along with a vague, generic “lemme know if you wanna hang or something” offer, just like every true love story begins. And voila—my boyfriend bucket was magically filled! Well, I suppose “voila” is kind of misleading… after weeks of game playing (him, not me), not hearing from him for long periods of time and several awkward interactions at sketchy bars, voila—my boyfriend bucket was filled! But this is all a story for another time. Let’s get back to the issue at hand, shall we?