flashingreds...
just give me one good year
(2004-01-02, 4:07 p.m.)
I�ve decided next year on New Year�s, I either need to take a trip far away, thus eliminating the possibility of being guilted into leaving the house, or I need to have an induced coma from December 30 to January 2. Preferably the latter.

If I�d been in a coma, I wouldn�t still have puffy eyes and a headache. I couldn�t have whipped out all the depressing songs about Christmas, December and worst of all, New Year�s Day (that U2 song does not count), and played them over and over, forcing myself, as usual, to face the first hours of the year with a small, dark soul. My god, it�s just so bloody pathetic.

Some stupid television show (god, I think it was a soap opera, back when I was ill) in the recent past had a New Year episode in which a girl was telling her boyfriend that how one spends NYE predicts how the year will be spent. It is, of course, horseshit, but damn them for putting that niggling thought in my head. I spent it at a friend�s dinner party, irritated and embarrassed at a bit of news that she�d withheld from me. I fled home and walked to the cop party, where every attendee was a townie. Not a townie like me, but a townie that went to high school with everyone else at the party, who married their high school sweetheart and bought an SUV and a house, whose parents are all friends and who all lived in the proper part of town. It was okay; I don�t mingle well without copious amounts of liquor. I told one amusing REO Speedwagon story, Marzetta and her hubby appeared in time to have a martini and to toot our horns, and they dropped me home before one am. I proceeded to dwell on the unsavory tidbit I learned at the dinner party, then repeatedly listened to One Good Year, which may be one of the most pathetically depressing songs ever written. (Maybe since it�s nearly 60 degrees today, I should take the opportunity to dig a giant hole in the yard and bury that wretched disc, lest I feel compelled to continue that tradition for even one more year.)

I spent a lot of time at the parents� house over the holidays, trying to make up for my siblings� absence. It�s just such a stupid, horrible, lonely time, and I feel obliged to go be the child for my parents, who basically detest each other. And I was a child. I had quite a fit at my mother, who insisted upon playing New Age light rock religious music as I lost miserably at cards on Christmas Eve, instead of the somewhat-more-acceptable Christmas oldies, and got my way. I pestered the cats and slept in and didn�t make the bed and gave impromptu lectures about human diet and the care of cats� toenails. I ate their food and let them buy me meals and groceries. I let them feel needed. Actually, it looks like I did need them.

I told Kate I don�t make resolutions. At least not till my birthday, which seems more sensible and manageable. That gives me three more months to get something accomplished, before I have to take a serious inventory of all aspects of life and to make a plan of action. Till then, I�m still on the hunt for another job, at the worst possible time of year, and I hope the hubcap fairy will bless me with one more matching hubcap. If it�s anything like me, I know the car will feel better once it looks better, too.

In the meantime, I will resolve this much: I will give up the unhealthy crush. I resolve to buy my own beer and to not accept rides home from the usual sources. To keep company with people who actually care about me, not ones for whom I�m simply a source of entertainment.

Normalcy, please.