New Year's Day Musings
Category: Kitchen Sink...
Posted Wednesday, January 01, 2003 at 04:12 PM [GMT-6]

I love New Year's Day. It's one of the few remaining holidays that's essentially non-commercialized; you don't have to spend a dime to enjoy it. It's one of the few holidays where sitting around doing nothing is not only acceptable, but recommended. And it marks the kind of transition that warms an accountant's heart. More about that in a minute.

We spent New Year's Eve with friends, playing an enjoyably sillly game while a DVD of "Eight Legged Freaks" played in the background, grazed on an amazing array of empty-caloried food-like substances, and toasted midnight with some truly awful alcohol-free apple cider and grape juice. We were home and in bed around 1:00...really late (or early) for us. It was a pleasant and stress-free way to welcome Y2K.v3.

We slept until about 7:30 or so, had a leisurely breakfast and read the paper while draining a pot of coffee. The dog walked us, then we went for a run, continuing a long tradition of getting in a good workout on New Year's Day. We generally try to go for a tandem ride, weather permitting, but today our bike is in the shop for a new timing chain. Anyway, the extremely windy conditions would have kept us off the bike, so we substituted a five-mile run - long enough to justify what we were about to do at lunch, but not so long as to impair our ability to enjoy it. Lunch was honey-glazed ham, hopping john with jalapeño black-eyed peas (you did have your black-eyed peas today, didn't you?), baked butternut squash, homemade biscuits and carrot cake from Rosa's. It really doesn't get any better than that, beer commercial testimonials to the contrary. Then, time to retire to the couch for mindless TV ("American Flyers" for our bicycling quota - the second best cycling movie ever made, an episode or two from the Twilight Zone marathon - slightly tarnished by the Subway sponsorship...worst commercials on TV, on the whole, especially those featuring that Jim yahoo - and now a DVD of "Reign of Fire," the second best dragon movie ever made. All the while the wind continues to howl, making our laziness that much more justifiable. And enjoyable.

You may have noticed an omission from this description, possibly a glaring one, depending on your perspective. No football. Not that I have anything against the bowl games; I just haven't worked up an interest in any of the matchups.

I also haven't mentioned resolutions. I don't know anyone who makes New Year's resolutions. Or, perhaps, no one who will admit to making them. If you do, fine. That doesn't make you a bad person. But for me - and this is just for me, mind you - New Year's resolutions would be the way I would admit to and rationalize my failures from the preceding year. For example, perhaps I resolve to have more patience with idiot drivers. This implies that I wasn't very patient last year. (This is, by the way, absolutely true, but that's beside the point.) That's sort of a negative way of viewing things.

I prefer instead to think in terms of New Year's goals. Goals don't focus on or even acknowledge past failures. The downside is that goals also imply a higher degree of accountability. Again, that's just my perspective.

But, resolutions can be entertaining. I've always wondered, if most people can't keep 'em longer than a week or two, why don't they resolve to do the opposite of what they really want to accomplish. Want to lose weight? Resolve to eat a box of Krispy Kremes each day. Want to raise your IQ? Resolve to watch "The Bachelorette" each week. That would work, wouldn't it?

The real attraction of New Year's Day for me is the transition to a new calendar, the anticipation of a clean temporal slate. Books are closed, yearly totals (of whatever) are tabulated. Unless your life is based on an accrual basis of reckoning, events and results are easily slotted, categorized, archived. The clock literally starts over again. The Month-At-A-Glance on my desktop (the real one) is closed and filed, replaced by a new one, fresh and clean. [Incidentally, this is one pleasure that will never be fulfilled by a PDA-resident electronic calendar.]

These are the transitions I hold dear: another new beginning to a decade-long annual cycle of reading through the Bible, day-by-day; a new workout schedule to complete in meticulous, OCD-driven detail (it all has to do with discipline, for me); a new set of accounting worksheets in my crude-but-effective and oh-so-cheep Excel-based bookkeeping system; a fresh calendar for adding opportunities to learn more about my craft, my hobbies, my abilities (and limitations).

It's gonna be a great year! Feel free to join me.