Wednesday, January 30, 2013

New Year's Eve, age 50


The hubby only made it to 11:15 this year. I pour myself a glass of Korbel with a splash of Midori; it’s called a Green Goblin. Sometimes I fix a drink just because it has a silly name. I sit down with my kids to watch New Year’s Rockin’ Eve and the Korean pop star, Psy, comes on to do his gosh-I-hope-so one-hit-wonder song “Gangnam Style”. My daughters, 12 and 10, dance frenetically and I laugh so hard I can barely hold my phone still as I tape them (oh yeah, that’s going on their wedding video someday). I wonder, will anyone even remember this guy next New Year’s Eve?
As midnight approaches, the kids and I watch Train sing “Imagine”, which always makes me choke up, and I resist the urge to tell them about John Lennon for the umpty-seventh time. The ball drops in Times Square – tape delayed, of course, since we live on the west coast – and I hug my beautiful, blessed children to ring in 2013. Then I tiptoe into the bedroom to kiss Dan.
“Happy New Year,” I whisper.
“Mmm phmmmm hmm,” is his reply. Or something like that.
When Justin Bieber comes on for what seems like the fourth time that night, I shoo the kids off to bed and sit down with my Green Goblin, switching to another channel. Emma comes out to kiss me goodnight one more time and knocks over my drink. Brilliant, I think as I spritz the wall with 409, only 30 minutes into the new year and I am cleaning up a sticky mess already. Doesn’t bode well.
            With everyone asleep, I sit on the couch mindlessly adding apps to my iPhone. At this point I am watching Kathy and Anderson on CNN and wondering if I need to be more drunk to really enjoy them. Maybe I should play the “giggling Anderson” drinking game. That would sure do the trick.

            Heaven help me, I love New Year’s Eve. I’m a hopeless optimist. At one in the morning on January 1st, I decide to start writing my resolutions down. Funny thing: because of my iPhone, I have now started assuming that if I double space in Word, a period will appear at the end of the sentence. Or maybe it’s the champagne.

Anyway, here’s what I write down. And I’m putting it on my blog, for accountability.
  • Stop using the f-word so much. (And not by substituting some other swear word in its place.) It’s just ugly and unladylike. My wake-up call happened when I was working my seasonal job at World Market in Glendale. The store is located at the corner of one of the worst-designed shopping plazas ever, in terms of parking. We regularly hear honking at the three-way stop right outside our doors. One day as I rang up a customer, there was a loud series of honks followed by a woman’s voice yelling “You fucking asshole!” After a beat or two, I raised my eyebrows and looked at my customer. “Well, that was lovely,” I commented. But it really stuck. Because not only I was embarrassed for her, I knew with certainty that it could have been me. And I don’t want to be that person.
  • Learn some Spanish. Take a class, get Rosetta Stone, something. I live in Southern California, for pete's sake, it just makes sense.
  • Take the self-defense class at the Y next month.
  • The mundane: clean the garage. Take old clothes to Goodwill. Go to all of Charlie’s home games to see him play tuba in the marching band. Take the dogs to the dog park more.
  • The profound: meditate, as much as possible. This may honestly be the hardest one to keep, because that kind of focus is really hard, and it always seems like those 15 minutes are impossible to give up. But it’s so helpful to a scattered brain like mine, and I know it.
  • Follow my doctor’s advice for once, and do the things he says I need to do. Let’s face it: the 50-year-old body is a lot different from the 30-year-old, even the 40-year-old body. I have lousy cholesterol and not the healthiest diet. Eckhart Tolle says in The Power of Now, “if you knew a food made you sick, would you keep eating it? Of course not, because that would be madness.” Well, it's time to stop the madness. I want to feel good. Not just in 2013, but all the time.
  • Oh yeah: finish draft #2 of my book and get a book proposal out in the world, even if I have to pay somebody to kick my butt. (Cough, cough, writing group, cough)
  • Related: write more blog stuff. Okay, just write more in general.
  • But most of all, I resolve to slow down, which may seem counter-productive. But I know that if I slow down, I’ll be more likely to remember these things and keep them in my life.


That’s it. Goodnight, Green Goblin. Time to get started!

The girls decorated a cake for us this year.

P.S. As you can see by the date on this post, I am off to a slow start on that "write more" resolution. I haven't signed up for the self-defense class, either. But the f-bombing has slowed way down. Come on, I've got eleven more months... right?