Happy Anticlimactic New Year

Here it comes, the champion of all anticlimactic moments: 12:01 a.m. January 1st. Think about it. How many weeks have you been planning or wondering what you will be doing on New Year’s Eve: a club; a party; which party; should I go out at all; will it snow; it snowed; will they plow? I’m not a big planner so I generally wait until someone makes a suggestion. And those suggestions usually consist of whose house we should all hunker down in, avoiding drunks on the road or, worse, police checkpoints looking for drunks on the road and harassing everybody! Overpriced bars and prix fixe dinners that are only marginally more expensive than the same meal on any other day but include a glass of cheap champagne… My husband has to work so I’ll go to one of several friends’ houses, eat and drink more than I should, and at midnight everyone will yell and hug and kiss then…what? Ever notice how awkward New Years Eve parties get after midnight? No one quite knows what to do, when to leave. It’s as if you went to a play and the curtain came down in scene 2. Is it over? Should I…mosey…up the …aisle now? Because climactic moments in life are not as definitive as those in the movies. Your life doesn’t fade to black, role credits, fade out. It keeps going. Scarlet O’Hara actually gets up the next morning to discover that tomorrow is not another day but is actually today… again. The Terminator; where does he go between saying he’ll be back and actually coming back? This is why I don’t want another dog even though my heart just melted at the new ASPCA commercial that knotted my gut in guilt. But I know that right after we ooh and ahh over the new puppy, the Kodak moment will end and the fight will begin: “You take the dog out.” “No, you take the dog out.” “I took the dog out yesterday.” “We didn’t have a dog yesterday”. “I was practicing.” This is why I think cooking is a waste of time. It doesn’t matter if you have spent six hours basting a turkey or three minutes nuking a pizza: dinner lasts ten to twenty minutes. And what about weddings? You plan those for YEARS and they are over in a few short hours. If I ruled the world there would be a law that an event needs to last at least 1/4th as long as it took to plan it. Clearly New Years Eve will never measure up to this standard. The entire event hinges on one second! That magical moment when we yell “One”! The two or three seconds that follow are filled with hugs and kisses, swills of champagne and then… well, it’s nothing but awkward. Still, I’ve always nursed a mild superstition that how you spend your New Years Eve influences how you will spend your year. Clearly, sitting in my house alone is not how I want this to go. So I will hop into the shower, do something with these nails, and get myself over to our friends’ house. And at a few minutes to midnight I will call my husband at work and thank him for giving up his holiday in favor of his paycheck, hoping that this is the year sacrifices like this no longer need to be made. And I’ll wish him a happy new year because, without optimism, there is no point. Happy New Year, everybody. Ten, nine, eight, seven, six….