Another Year Older...and hopefully wiser?

I finally turned 27 this past week. For the first time since I turned 22 (such an anticlimactic age), I was actually looking forward to it. Because the entire year I was 26 sucked--majorly sucked. So I'm ready to turn over a new page in the book of my life. A clean page. In a way it feels like another chance. I've got a new job and for the first time in a year and a half, I like what I'm doing. I believe in the company I work for. I'm not spending all day proofing ads that everyone just throws in their trash with barely a glance for a company that steals people's money (albeit in a legal way) and for an agency that is slowly destroying my soul. It's demoralizing to get up and go to a job every day that you hate. That you know you're not great at and that nobody truly appreciates the work you do. My title at my previous full-time job may have been Copy Editor, but I (and all the others in the proofing department) were treated as the agency scapegoats. Because problems weren't solved unless blame was apportioned. It was less about fixing errors than about never making them, unless you were an account rep and then your errors were never your own; it was our fault for not figuring out they were errors.
But back to now. Now I'm at a job I like. The people work together. The goal is to produce the best product possible; not who can make the most people look bad in order to work their way up the corporate ladder fastest. And my co-workers like me. They like how I do my job. And if I find something in a later round of proofing, nobody ever says, "Why didn't you find it before?" Despite the fact that I'm commuting on the interstate now (something I've always tried to avoid) and my commute is sometimes 45 minutes or more, I don't dread the trip because I like the job I get to do when I arrive.
But I'm not forgetting everything I learned while I was unemployed. I don't want to stay in the rat race of Corporate America for the rest of my life. So I'm still going to apply to grad school. It's just that now I don't have to do so while sleeping on my grama's couch. It's a nice feeling to know that I'm paying my own way again. As I've mentioned before, I enjoy my self-sufficiency. I always have. So here's to a new year (because the one in January did not come in with a bang). It can't be worse than the last, so I'm letting my hopes become buoyant again.