As the year draws to a close, your WEEKEND stalwarts have grown sentimental. Sure, we’ll be glad to be done with the 60 pages worth of final papers our mildly sadistic (okay, majorly sadistic) professors assigned us. We certainly won’t miss that god-awful 9 a.m. seminar with that kid who wouldn’t shut up. And I guess it will be nice to finally sleep, you know, at night. But we might yet miss you, 2011. It’s been a fun, albeit slightly delirious, ride. In the spirit of the holiday season, we’ve decided to list out our most memorable moments/memes/mishaps of this past year. Consider it a parting gift.

1) Occupy Everything. We’re pretty sure this started out as a legitimate revolutionary movement intended to express discontent with Wall Street hegemony and corporate greed, but it has quickly turned into one of the biggest LOLs of 2011. We watched in awe as this grew into one of the the year’s fastest-spreading Internet memes (our personal favorite: Occupy Sesame Street). We can’t even think the word #occupy without adding a hashtag these days.

2) Campus Climate Report and the Sex Week debacle. After national TV crews have gone, we’ve yet again managed to cleverly outmaneuver the issue at hand. Sexual climate at Yale? Stop your casual, sexually licentious behavior and get a real relationship, hooligans! Harassment and assault? Definitely we should ban Sex Week, with its “titillating displays and ‘adult’ film stars,” to ensure that we all stop talking about sex. Conveniently, amid all this talk about how we shouldn’t talk about sex, assault will seem like an issue that is far, far away.

3) The Arab Spring. Apparently one Egyptian man was so overjoyed by the role social media played in the Tahrir Square protests, he named his daughter “Facebook” Jamal Ibrahim. Take that, Google+.

4) Harry Potter. It was difficult to bid Avada Kedavra to our favorite book/film series, but we’re over it. Well, kind of. It was our childhood, okay! We also haven’t quite gotten over our jealousy of Emma Watson. Sought after by both Victor Krum and Ron Weasley, AND party to a hot hookup scene with Harry? Come on.

5) Republicans. We’ll let this speak for itself: Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, John Huntsman Jr., Gary Johnson, Ron Paul, Rick Perry, Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum. Did we mention Michele Bachmann?

6) LMFAO (the soundtrack to every gross glug of Dubra in 2009) scored their first number-one hit over the summer in the form of the strangely infectious “Party Rock Anthem.” Bet you never thought that would happen.

We’ll say it again: it’s been fun. Until 2012, WEEKEND wishes you a productive reading week, relaxing winter break and raginnnn New Years.

And here’s hoping next year is even crazier than this one.