ghosts of new years past

there are few things more torturous than the holiday season. in my mind it begins in october with halloween (the one holiday i love to celebrate, my favorite in fact) and ends in february with valentine’s day (a “holiday” that i have steadfastly hated since i was a teenager.) the holidays are full of shoulds and musts: you must spend time with your family, you should be in a relationship, you must be able to make small talk, you should be enjoying yourself, dammit! i spent a lot of money on this party.

in my mind, new years eve was the fun midway point between the forced family togetherness of thanksgiving and christmas and my birthday in january. new years eve was our reward for putting up with all the snide remarks, the passive aggression, the bickering, the all-out fights, the bad food, the disappointing presents, and all those other tiny heartbreaks wrapped in a glittery red bow. new years was perfection, a night that you are encouraged to blow off steam, to drink to excess, and to have the greatest time of your life. i thought this until i took a good long look back at the new years eves that have come before this one.

it started out innocently enough. my sister and i had shirley temples once at a pool-side bar and after that not knowing what was in them (i don’t think any one of us ever did) my parents would make us festive new years eve “shirley temples” of seven-up with red food coloring in them. eventually we graduated to sparkling grape juice and apple cider; having a palate even then i had a particular type and brand of sparkling grape juice i preferred. my mother correctly predicted that i would grow up to be a wine drinker. my sister, lel, and i had a tradition in our pre-teen and teenage years of watching the film flashdance every new years eve. why my super overprotective mother that would not allow us to watch the smurfs because it had a sorcerer in it allowed us to watch flashdance, a film about a stripper, i do not know. these are unanswerable questions, but every year we watched flashdance.

until the first bad new year’s eve that i recall, the year i was 16. no one else wanted to stay up until midnight. with my parents and my sister snug in their beds, i rang in the new year watching tori amos’ perform pretty good year from the concert for RAINN. it’s not a festive song; i cried. this is the video:

the next year, i spent new years eve (yes of my 17th year) in ohio with my 31 year old girlfriend, trying champagne for the first time. there was a bad snowstorm and we had pizza delivered. i thought that ohio was the coolest place ever. during the sally era we always had nye dinner at a steakhouse who’s name i cannot remember and given that neither of us ate steak and that they had a smaller menu on nye (chicken with raspberries? no thank you) we would always end up eating steak and not being happy with ourselves hours later. those nights we spent with “the gang” a group that i will always remember fondly, fun people with whom we would play cards or mingle without that forced frivolity or small-talk. the gang had known each other so long there was no awkwardness and they accepted newcomers with warmth.

after this there’s a series of uncomfortable nye’s i’m surprised that i forgot… there’s the nye where i brought my new boyfriend to sally’s gang’s party (in very poor taste but i was 19 or 20, i didn’t know any better, and had no other friends). that was the nye where it snowed in MS for the first time in many years and when i called friends at midnight they were shutting down the waffle house in vicksburg. unheard of! i know i spent a new year’s with kevin after that, but i can’t remember what we did. perhaps that is best. then after kevin and i split up, and sally & tracey made sure that i didn’t end up dead, i started to spend all the holidays with tracey’s friends in cincinnati/northern kentucky.

i would like to say nice things about the nky lesbians. they weren’t especially friendly, and any time someone tried to invite new people out the new people would be alienated because the entire time would be talking about the good old days years ago. no new people joined the group unless they started dating someone in the group and you just learned to deal with it. i have stories about going to provincetown that feel like i was there and i’ve never been it was a nye, in a house that smelled like cat pee so bad that you didn’t want to inhale, that started a series of events that put me in the most dysfunctional relationship of my life. imagine it please: you’re going through a divorce, it’s been about 8 months since you separated. in this time you have been isolated drinking way too much, working 3 jobs to pay the bills while being a full time student. (yep, i did that. i used to eat a peanut butter & jelly sandwich in the car driving to one of my jobs and that was lunch.) i had good friends that loved me and took very good care of me, and i had people that were interested in dating me but i felt broken inside. cut to nye when someone i had said “oh lord, i would never date her” gave me a cute purple bag full of hershey’s kisses at midnight. “from one single person to another,” she said, “i thought you might want some kisses at midnight.” i dare you to not decide you’re falling in love with someone like that.

before you knew it, i had left dayton (something i planned to do anyway) and had moved in with “i would never date her”. it’s not that either of us were bad people, we just weren’t right for each other. we were so glaringly wrong for each other i’m surprised our mutual friends didn’t intervene. maybe they did and i just blocked it out. we were living in a gorgeous apartment and it didn’t take us long to realize that we couldn’t stand each other. she was passive, as well as passive aggressive and we would have long drawn-out fights in her truck about where to eat dinner. i was aggressive and a drunk and i used hating my job as an excuse to do several shots the moment i walked in the door. it was a match made in hell. neither of us were dealing with our individual issues. we were broken by the past, lost, and the worst possible versions of ourselves.

i don’t need to tell you that it ended badly. i won’t go into the lies, deceit, and behind the other’s back actions that took place on both our parts. then, i spent a nye in mississippi with 3 of my most favorite people in the world. they are all three still my most favorite people in the world though i am not as close as i would wish to be with any of them anymore. we started our hard core partying the night BEFORE nye when it really got crazy with some absinthe which was still not legal at that point… hey we were still babies, i was 24 i think. nye was a disaster. i got mad at my partner at the time because of a comment he made about another woman and proceeded to be a drama queen. he spent the better part of that night hiding in the kitchen of someone else’s house mostly hidden by the refrigerator. we made up only to spend 45 minutes in line at what-a-burger (the only place in jxn open in the wee hours of any day) to not move at all before giving up!

what exactly is it that i think is so great about nye? i don’t know. i’ve had as many bad ones as good ones. the ones since i have lived in MS again have all been good, thankfully. when i throw a party, i find that i have a great time and i hope that others do too. i love to throw parties. we have hosted nye (we being me, my partner, my roommate, or just my friends) every year since i have been back til this one. the purple house just wanted to host parties, it needed to, so that was our excuse for that even here in my apartment we have had some great ones. last year it was just me, kferg, and another friend eating pizza and passing out but we had a great time, yet this holiday that i have gotten all dressed up for, went out for, put so much into, hasn’t really been great overall.

so this year i decided not to go out. it’s nothing sad, i had 4 parties that i could go to, one of which took place in nola, but nothing seemed preferable to hanging out and cooking a meal. would i like someone else to be hanging out to eat the meal? sure. am i going to lose my shit because i’m alone? nope. every one of my friends made sure that i knew that there were places to be. that warms my heart. nothing seemed like something i wanted to do. i’m in a quiet place, i didn’t want to make small talk with strangers. i’m not any good at it and i don’t like it. i know 2011 holds many events that i will attend because i love them and i always do: best of jackson and MS heARTs against AIDs being the ones early in the year. i will go to those and make small talk even though i’m not good at it and i’m sure i will have a great time. i always do. i love those events.

growing up homeschooled, i always felt like i was missing out on something. other people were out doing what i needed to be or should be doing. i wasn’t cool enough. i had a big chip on my shoulder. i thought that i could overcome that by having the best time ever once i became an “adult”. i did have the best time ever. i had some amazing times. i had times i won’t put on a blog crazy, insane, epic times. that didn’t make me like small talk any more than i already did, it didn’t make me any more outgoing than i am now, and that didn’t make me any less lonely. that’s the weird thing that some of us have to learn – we can be in a room full of people and still feel as lonely as if we were alone. tonight i am cooking a lovely dinner for myself. i will ring in the new year alone. it’s not sad, it’s not pathetic, it’s just what i’m doing. i am single.

i have great friends who love me. i am at the best place i have ever been personally and professionally. there isn’t any shame in being alone. that’s the lesson i need to learn and that is why i actively chose to be alone tonight. i’ve had some new year’s eves with the greatest loves of my life that have been awful. today is just a day. being loved means something every day of the year. if you would rather hang out in your house than go out and party, you shouldn’t feel bad about it. i don’t. i know that a lot of people i love are having a blast without me tonight and would like for me to be there, and when i’m up to it i will be.