A New Calendar...

According to the common Gregorian calendar, today is the last one before the calendar runs out and has to start all over again for the 2,012th time since people started counting (except if you're in Samoa). It is because of this momentous fact, that there's nowhere else left to go after December except to go back January, that people decide to drink and shout descending numbers at each other as the clock approaches midnight.

This time last year, I was unaware when the exact second of midnight-approaching happened for reasons too complex to get into... but let's try anyway:

In what would later be known in a pointless blog post by someone recalling the event as "the great break-up of 2010", I spent the evening with a large group of people, many of whom have no problem with me personally, but many of whom have personal problems with others of the many, but tolerated each other for the simple fact of getting along and being civil and other phrases which suggest a mutual disdain masked with friendliness. (Reading that back seems like I'm calling such people two-faced, which I'm not really but incidentally that does coincide with January being named after the Roman god Janus - the god of new beginnings often visually depicted as having two faces, one looking back retrospectively and one looking to the future. Funny how stuff links up.) As the stroke of January approached, the air between parties became bitter, or maybe it was because it was Winter. Either way, by 11:45pm it was clear that one lot of people wished to vacate via taxi; a taxi which did not arrive until 11:53pm (or something, I was fairly tipsy by this point and being fed information that someone hates someone else and someone said things about someone's dress or something and someone's hair was probably pulled). Our friend, the taxi, managed to get a group of six (probably) of us to somewhere else by the time 11:59pm came around. Upon leaving the taxi to walk somewhere more indoorsy, someone probably collapsed onto the snow (or slush) covered ground and fireworks went off in the distance all around. Any single one of these seconds I was living through could have been the momentous midnight maker, but with no TV, radio, or Greenwich-synchronised time-telling device to tell us exactly which one it was, that entire walk from the taxi to the front door became magical. Except it wasn't. It was a walk to the front door after getting out a taxi after a night out. The world carried on as normal, just as it always does.

I haven't become cynical of celebrating New Year (as many of the people who can see the crap I put on Facebook might often think), but there are those who use the humble realm of Facebook to proclaim how the new year is an excuse for a new start, a new me, a new diet, a new change of underwear, a new dog, a new calendar... Somehow I don't particularly see the appeal in altering my outlook on life or eating habits based solely on the fact that the little '2011' in the corner of my computer screen is henceforth to be replaced with a '2012'. My outlook on life has always been mediocre with occasional hits and occasional misses and I don't believe that any force or power on the planet will take notice and make the next 365 days (or is it 366 this time?) filled with chocolate and rainbows and boobs.

This portion of the Internet will still exist and occasionally churn out gormless crap (like this) erratically and sporadically, despite my best intentions to keep doing this on a weekly basis. The fact that it's been over three weeks since the last one and that today is Saturday just proves how incoherent my posting-every-Wednesday mentality has become. Having said that, don't expect anything too special on the 4th, if anything at all.

Incidentally, once again I don't have anyone to kiss at midnight.