Blame it on the wine, the holiday, the hour, but this is probably going to be an uncharacteristically sappy post.
This year, sick of disappointing New Year’s Eves and with no promise of anything different, I decided that rather than trying for something great and wishing I’d aimed for a regular Friday night, I aimed even lower and opted for an evening in with my cats and a bottle of wine. Ultimately it was probably a good thing as I appear to have come down with a cold and probably wouldn’t have been up for a party anyway, and I’m not gonna say it was the best New Year’s I’ve ever had, but I can’t think of a better one.
Around 7:30, though, I started to panic. “I can’t spend New Year’s alone!” I thought. I felt guilty, although I wasn’t sure why. I wasn’t wishing for something better to do, but staying home felt like I was breaking the rules. I pulled out my journal.
I wonder how many times you have thought to yourself, “If we had been together at midnight, we would be together now.”
I wonder where you are now, tonight, where you will be when midnight comes again.
The thing is that, as I mentioned before, the New Year is the one holiday that I actually think is worth celebrating. I’m not religious, so Christmas, Easter, Yom Kippur, Kwanzaa, none of them mean a whole lot. A new year, though — that’s something to get excited about. That’s a holiday I can get behind. But how do you celebrate everything that it can represent? I don’t have a problem with the getting drunk and kissing someone thing (and really, maybe if I’d always had someone satisfactory to kiss I wouldn’t have been so disappointed in past years), but it certainly doesn’t seem adequate.
So I wrote a list of things I look forward to doing in the next year (not resolutions, exactly, but things I genuinely look forward to doing), watched Dick Clark, and wrote in my journal.
Here are some of the things I look forward to in 2006, in no particular order:
It’s gonna be a good year for me. I hope for you too.