Beginnings and Endings

"New Years is magical," I slurred on a friend's back porch, casually swigging back my vanilla vodka spiked white tea at 11pm on New Years Eve.

"How do you figure?" asked an old friend from high school, smiling in a very condescending way.

"Well, it's kind of like Mardi Gras. You can do whatever you want tonight, and it doesn't matter. Tomorrow is a new beginning."

"I disagree!" he said. "I can get into a car accident tonight and I will still have to wake up to a wrecked car and court date."

Well, no shit, if you're dumb enough to drive when you've been drinking, which you probably will, I thought, but did NOT say out loud. Flustered and unable to properly articulate a good comeback, I grunted and walked back inside.

"How drunk are you?" Corey asked, eyes wide.

"Why does everyone keep asking me that?" I asked. Or rather, I tried to ask, but the question ended in giggles.

In a 21 year old drunken haze, I commented to myself that yes, indeed, New Years was magical, everyone else's opinions be damned. I giggled, talked to myself, hugged people I hadn't seen in years, and told my best friends how much I "really, really, really" loved them, and referred to everyone as "dude" for a bulk of the night. In the morning, I woke up, sobered up, and got back to my life of pretending to be a grown up.

Maybe unlike my old friend, "doing whatever I want" doesn't require the crazy, sick, perverted, or even extreme. And I'm sure that my "wild" New Years Eve was tame by the standards of most of my peers.

And that's fine with me.

At dinner with my friend Daniel last night, I was telling him about my "crazy" night, laughing to myself. He then began to tell me about his which started with "I blacked out from 2am until 7am, but I know from others' stories that I was definitely awake."

Whoa, blacked out? I was asleep by 3am!

Yet again, my life is insanely out of synch with my friends.

And that's fine with me, as well.

So, as we all march to our individual drum beats, I wish everyone a very merry new year. I hope you all grown, live, learn, and experience all you desire. I wish that you have a couple of nights every once in a while filled with your own version of "magic".

And I wish the same for myself.