I think in lists.
I am in love with words and word order in a flippant sort of way, but I am really in love with words in numbered orders with descending importance.
Example: I asked my barista coworkers at the university to rank the milks in order of their steaming preference.
I love absolutes, and that is why I love the New Year.
Celebrating the new year gives me a reason to order and evaluate every iota of my life. Moreover, it gives me a chance to overextend myself into the lives of others to see if YOU are “reflecting” on the past year as I feel you ought to be.
I moved beyond “so, do you have a new year’s resolution” when I was eight. I want to know what the most fulfilling month of your year was, what your motto for last year was and how long it took for you to forget it. I want to know where you were last year and what your regrets were about that and how this night is going for you so far and where you think it will stack up to your other december thirtyfirsts. I want to know how you rank this year in comparison to all the other years you’ve fucked up. I want to know about your biggest fuck-ups, best kisses, worst Thursdays, and I want to hear about them in ascending order of how often you think about.
(As a side note, my sister was born today and I often think about what it must be like to have your birthday be on this very strange day, and I like to ask people what their feelings are on this subject every year. Having a family member with a major holiday for a birthday clearly makes me more interesting. Addy: I hope you are drowning in a bathtub of free birthday champagne somewhere and not reading my blog on your birthday vacation canadia binge. The gifts are almost in the mail).
Now that I’ve been in this city for a year and a half and I have friends who will listen to me at least long enough to tell me to shut up and get them another beer, I have learned exactly how much more I obsess about the new year than everyone else.
The week before the new year is probably the only week out of the year when I can be counted on to actually make real small talk. I could talk for hours about the ways in which we evaluate our lives. It is kind of an awkward passion, but it makes the holiday parties a little less stressful.
It is fitting that the only time I can get engaged with strangers in conversation is when we’re talking about ways you think you can be a better person. I can’t maintain eye contact for more than a minute and a half the other eleven months out of the year, but suddenly when you start owning up to not taking care of your body or writing your novel or being less of an asshole to your girlfriend, I can stay with you long enough to get somewhere.
A long string of my december thirtyfirsts were spent at home, on the couch, more or less married to the forty-eight hour Twilight Zone marathon on the Sci-Fi Network. They were interchangeably miserable affairs. I would be slumped over a big pillow in the corner of our gigantic green sectional, snuggled under a blanket, in my pajamas by 7:30pm, staring at the exact same lineup of episodes year after year. Sometimes my father would watch a few episodes with me, but inevitably I was alone as my parents and ever more interesting siblings had other plans. It was terrible, but I held fast to it as my tradition, and I proudly said that all I wanted one day was a boyfriend who just wanted to watch the Twilight Zone marathon as much as I did on New Year’s Eve.
Boy, those were big dreams.
This is the third consecutive year that I have not been in front of the television for the Twilight Zone marathon. Note that I still count this as a significant personal statistic.
Last night felt like a giant exhale, like the moment a pair of new shoes you’ve been breaking in start to fit comfortably. Or something. I spent time with some friends at my house, and at another friend’s house. I drank a beer and forced everyone to reminisce about their favorite months (June: I took two weeks off of work, watched every episode of Sex and the City on DVD and spent a week driving and hiking through the southwest. I also had a job, a place to live, health insurance, and food stamps. There were also more than four hours of daylight). At 11:30 we wandered over to Gasworks Park to watch the fireworks that set off from the Space Needle (literally, it looks as if the space needle is exploding… albeit in a colorful, joyful way). It was beautiful and mellow and simple.
I had forgotten all about the Twilight Zone until someone this morning asked me how I used to spend the holiday as a kid. I am not the sort of person that I was, which is expected, but I am more curious about the fact that I am changing with consciousness, without intentionally attempting to distance myself from that epoch. I am effortlessly different. So much for being self-aware.
I love that there is this holiday completely devoted to 1. something vaguely related to nature 2. new beginnings and 3. champagne and kissing. I love that for a minute, people really do believe in their ability to change, their ability to construct the PERFECT evening plans with the PERFECT outfit, the ability to convince themselves that next year really will be better. This night is full of so much hope (a secular kind of hope!(!!))
On the drive back from the park we attempted to deconstruct our mottoes from last year and create new, better, perfect ones for this year. Mottoes to set a triumphant tone, to manifest good sex and effortless parallel parking and other things like that. We didn’t come up with anything, but the macro way of thinking pleased me, and the company was good. Sometimes it is a lot easier to be an adult than it was to be fourteen.
At ten am this morning I found myself sitting at my breakfast table with a good friend, marveling over the fact that this 2009 was still perfect, and had not been ruined in any way by the events of the night before. It has been a long time coming.
May we all be sealed.
