happy new year!

Thinking about the past few years, I realize that New Year's Eve is one of the times when I'm most confronted with the fact that I'm a pessimist.  I suppose people who know me already know that about me.  But somehow, the passing of another year makes me even more melancholic.  Despite having been surrounded tonight by some really great people--and also having met some great new people--New Year's Eve mostly makes me think more about what hasn't been accomplished in the last year than about the exciting things that the new year may hold.

Really, what I usually want for New Year's Eve is to be alone, a chance to be introspective and still--quiet enough to actually feel the weight (both positive and negative) of the previous year, the way that the day-to-day gravity of life has shaped me into something different, the way that the simple force of being alive has pulled me in new directions.  I think I wish for a clearer reckoning--a settling of the bills, an evening of the balances, a passage through some toll both that would allow me to see more clearly the cost of my pathway through the previous year.

But, usually, I feel guilty about being anti-social, and so I end up at some event, sometimes one that doesn't really even fit me very well--which only highlights the ways that I'm out of place.  I'm actually grateful, this year, that Katie and Bryon's party died out before midnight, as other people headed off to other parties or merely back home to spend the countdown with their partners or families.  I'm happy not to be around other people when the clock strikes twelve; having to wish people a happy new year seems like bullshit to me, phony and pathetic and empty.  Not because I hope that people will have a crappy life in the year to come, but because our way of acknowledging the passing of time seems so insignificant and thoughtless.

Sometimes, instead of "happy new year," I guess I wish we could just say "thank you."