Kicking the New Year in the Knees

I had the most delightfully dull New Year's Eve ever. A full month of working with next to zero days off has been catching up on me like a runaway Mac truck and New Year's Eve found me barely able to keep my eyes open driving home from work. So going out was not in the plan. But a friend of mine from work, a Seventh Day Adventist unable to go out because it was a Friday night, lives in my apartment community and I asked her if I could join her and her roommate (who shares my love of yerba mate!) for the evening.

So Juanita, Keena and I sat around in their living room drinking cherry juice and watching Esther. I can't remember a tamer evening than that, which possibly atones for my wild Christmas at the Sommervilles. The three of us were so tired we barely stayed awake to greet the New Year; then we mumbled our Happy New Years and our goodnights, and I drove around the corner to my apartment and lay in bed for three hours shaking with exhaustion and unable to sleep because of the caffeine in three rounds of mate.

We had talked a little bit about New Year's Resolutions, which I don't normally make because I don't feel like capitulating to the pathos of a twenty-something single girl's failed attempts at self-improvement. However, I feel inclined this year to make a few, and I want to develop greater discipline in all areas of life, and what better opportunity to make some things new than the start of an unseen year?

So here they are:

1. Read 1 chapter of the Bible four times a week.
2. Keep off lost weight.
3. Get up at 7:00 every day except days off.
4. Better money management. (I have a well-laid-out plan for this, but you don't care, so it's staying in my journal.)
5. Clean the bathroom once a week.

I think if I make any more I'll give up. So there they are, and they'll be difficult enough. For instance, I hate cleaning the bathroom. Hate. Did I mention that I hate cleaning the bathroom? And I hate getting out of bed. So we're talking major life changes right there. Oh yes, and I'm not going to date until I'm twenty-seven. That's still ten years younger than my dad wanted, so I'll be doing pretty well. The kind of guy I'm interested in -- established, moderately successful, mature, looking for a life partner -- is too old for me right now, so I'll wait till I'm a little older and getting more established myself and then we'll be on even footing. As it is, I'm really really young, and having a largely satisfying time flying solo.

I impulse-bought a plant yesterday. A big bristling loveable Dracaena, much larger than the one I bought and watched wither away due to mites three years ago. My lost plant's name was Robert Browning (*puts hand over heart*), and although I tried to name this one Samwise, when I woke up this morning I thought of him as Robbie. So Robbie it is. He's currently sitting next to the basil on the floor by the window.

Today is cleaning, laundry, and taking-down-the-tree day. Like Bridget Jones, whose first diary I am reading before bed most nights, I am disgruntled that Christmas is over just when I was getting settled into the Christmas mood. I missed out on much of the mellow glow and dark holiness that I associate with the advent of Christmas -- thanks to retail -- and now that I could maybe enjoy it it's over. Well. There's always next year. Or this year, as the case now is.

Does anyone find a parallel between Helen Fielding, author of Bridget Jones's Diary, and Henry Fielding, author of Tom Jones? Or maybe that's a well-known cleverism and I'm slow on the uptake. This is the sort of trivia that wakes me up at four in the morning.