The Beginning of the End

There's a special kind of careless planning that has to go into every New Years Eve agenda for the night to really work. Too much stressing and advance-ticket buying and you're toast, too little and you're plain fucked. I have a good friend whose true art, it could be said, is his ability to just kind of make things work on the fly. Or at least it seems on the fly: in reality, the music and the zaniness and the shouting and the alcohol and the zen-like feeling of a good time are all finely orchestrated to present to the participant (in most cases, me) something of a vacation from reality, the kind of vacation where the destination is reached and you were having such a good time in the back seat you didn't even realize you'd traveled.

But anyway, 2012 is here, folks, and I had a heck of an evening ringing it in. Mostly because I've been telling myself this is the year I pull it all together, and so I wanted to send out 2011 with such a sonic blast of excessive buffoonery that I wouldn't know whether to cry for leaving it or to just be glad the hangover's over. Which it is, by the way.


In order to not slander approximately three dozen other rambunctious twenty somethings, I'll skip over last night's details. Suffice it to say, there was a burrito involved. And that's all you're getting. And yes, I just ate it as a really late snack. And no, I know that's not exciting. At all. And of course, this paragraph was a complete waste of your time. But please, do keep reading.

I didn't sleep before my shuttle to PDX, and soon found myself sandwiched between one of those by-now cliche 300-pound seatmates and the window. He left me so little room I literally couldn't remove my sweatshirt and jacket, which wouldn't have been too big a problem if the flight attendants hadn't quickly taken to announcing there was a serious problem with the heating system, and that we'd all just pretty much have deal. I sat in an agonized state of sweaty horror watching the t-shirt clad row of women in front of me fan themselves and make little moaning sounds in between bouts of declaring they just couldn't take it much longer. Meanwhile, I just hoped the fat guy felt really, really bad, though his thug attire and footlong chin beard suggested otherwise. Or maybe that's just me making assumptions. Big, fat assumptions.


I know I shouldn't be so pissed about something so trivial as literally sweating the balls off that I didn't use to gather my courage and ask the fat homie to please just fucking stand up for thirty goddamned seconds so I could remove my warm layers, but doesn't it seem like something he should have just been keenly aware of? I feel like if I was that fat and inconvenient I would make every effort to provide a comfortable flying experience to the unlucky chump assigned a seat beside me, and that would include realizing maybe he couldn't take his jacket off because I'm too fat and he literally can't move his arms and he would probably ask me to move but I look really scary, what with my tattoos and my chin beard and my considerable bulk.

So but anyway, this year I shall: drink less. Run more. Land a kickass job, stat. Spend more time working on this blog. Stop apologizing for my behavior, unless it's warranted. Prepare for the apocalypse (which really just means get as much action as possible). Find some way to further renounce Catholicism. Contemplate law school, then scoff at it yet again. Sell my LSAT books on eBay.