It Still Has That New Year Smell

I’m feeling a bit out of sorts. And I’m feeling like I’ve been feeling a bit out of sorts for awhile. I’m unsure what sort of recharge is necessary, what sort of reboot, but it is apparently not frozen egg rolls and a half rack of PBR. I feel like I’m in a bit of a quandary, like I’m unsure how to go about this post. Do I do a year in review sort of thing, or do I look forward into the new year?

2007 (quick, but with feeling): A tough and rough year in spots, but generally the payoffs were better than I had guessed they would be. I got to watch my son take his first shaky steps into the person he will continue to become, watched him laugh, watched him figure out the joy of cheese, watched him shake his booty to pretty much any music with a beat, watched him live. I did my first role in a full length film and got to do a play that I’m crazy proud to have been a part of. I got out of this year with an amazing lady still by my side and some great friends who held me up from time to time (even if they didn’t realize I was starting to fall).

Enter meandering guitar solo with tasteful distortion, maybe a little flanger…

We welcomed in our own Rockin’ New Years Eve on the couch with the above mentioned PBR and eggrolls, a few episodes of "Arrested Development" and the last half of Poltergeist (starting where dude eats maggot chicken and then tears off his own face). At a couple minutes to midnight we cracked open a bottle of champagne and went outside our front door where you can see the Space Needle. They typically shoot fireworks off the Space Needle, and started to again this year.

We watched the show start and stop after about 45 seconds. We stood there thinking that the displays were a tad longer in years past, a tad more impressive, but we were also under a far deeper influence in years past. We didn’t find out until the next day that there was a computer glitch that kept the show from going on until someone went out and manually lit the fireworks; we had already retreated inside. I also learned that when the news cameras didn’t have fireworks to show, they began to wildly tune back into whatever newscasters they had stationed around our fair city – including going back to a couple of them who were caught passionately kissing. Awesome.

Resolutions? Aside from being resolute in finishing a couple more PBR’s before 12 rolled around, I didn’t make any. It begins to be a bit grating to me when people make a big deal out of not making New Year’s resolutions. It reminds me a lot of vegetarians who spend an inordinate amount of time talking about the meat they don’t eat. I don’t care, just shut up and don’t do it.

Top of my head resolutions for 2008:

• Stop being so hard on people who make a big deal out of not making resolutions. Same goes for vegetarians
• Stop trying to convince my son that crying just means he’s doomed to go to Hell.
• Eat more Brussels sprouts. And more sweet potatoes. Not necessarily together, I just feel I’ve come to them late in life and I have some catching up to do.
• Try harder to mock my own sense of self importance.
• Plant a tree.

I hope everyone had a great start to Aught 8, let’s go…