2011

Here's how my New Year's usually goes.  I do not leave my house.  I watch whatever marathon they are showing on the SciFi channel, which is usually The Twilight Zone.  The Twilight Zone gets really, really amusing after 10pm, because by then my body and my brain are having a fight.  My body is going, "Sleeeeeeeep."  And my brain is going, "Must! Stay! Awake!"  So I pretty much end up acting like a squirrel on speed.  Which, when combined with The Twilight Zone, makes for some pretty interesting events.  At midnight, I drag myself to room and force myself to stay awake long enough to write a morose, existential, and/or resolution-type journal entry.  Then, I close my eyes to enjoy my first sleep of the year, which always ends in me sleeping late for the first time that year.

That is how it always goes.  I remember one year, we watched Animal Planet's marathon of The Most Extreme instead of The Twilight Zone.  But other than that, it's been pretty constant.

I like constancy.  I like traditions.  I hate change.

If you're wondering if I hate New Year's, the answer is yes.  I hate it.  It's a time when everybody (including me) makes resolutions that they may or may not keep.  It's a time when everybody (including me) forgets what year to put in the date.  It's when people take back the Christmas presents they don't like, the terminally depressed become suicidal, and it's a totally imaginary excuse to get as drunk as Cap'n Jack Sparrow on holiday.

I guess what it always comes down to is my silly belief that I should have been around when they invented all those cultural isms we take for granted today.  Time, for example, is completely imaginary (at least the way we've marked it).  Why do we feel the need to break down a constantly moving thing into tiny, tiny parts?  Not only did we break all of time into chunks (milennia, centuries, decades, years), but we took those chunks and subdivided them into smaller chunks (months, fortnights, weeks, days).  Then we took those smaller chunks of the chunks and cut them to pieces, too (hours, minutes, seconds, miliseconds).  I mean.  Wow.

If I had been around when they were first suggesting all of that, I would have distracted everyone and burned their calculations.  Time is imaginary.  We totally made it up.  Like money.

I hate time just as much as I hate money.  Time marches on, as they say, but sometimes it's marching in place, and sometimes it's marching in double-time.  And it always seems that when I want it to march in double-time, it's stuck in the mud.  And when I want it to slow down, those drums beat it faster and faster.

I guess what I'm saying is: yey for the new year, whoop-de-doo!  But this year, could we maybe just pretend like time and money don't exist?  No?  Expletive.