Here's to 2011

it's that time of the year: when facebook is cluttered with collages of your semi-friends' year's worth of statuses; when people make year-long promises about as ridiculous as the promises they make to their significant other; when people get drunk off half the amount of alcohol i drink regularly.

yep: new year's eve.

i have nothing particularly interesting to say about this holiday except that i like it and i hope none of you have been tom sawyered into working late tonight.

but sometimes it feels as though american holidays are a lot like american pharmaceuticals: only celebrating the good emotions and trying to ignore the bad altogether.

we have a holiday for love-- that'd be valentine's, sadly-- and we have one for happiness known as christmas or your birthday. halloween is for a mixture of being a slut, eating candy and partially for fear-based entertainment. we even have a prank holiday on april first. there are also the apology holidays-- the holidays that exist for those of us who hate christmas and valentines-- those are drunk-days like st. patricks and the fourth of july.

there are no holidays to glorify negative emotions just as there are only pills to get rid of negative emotions. anger and anxiety are diseases and they should not be a part of our holiday. i move we make an angry day-- it can be in june.

anyway, new year's is a weird one. we get drunk, or coked out, or trip balls, or whatever it is we do, like a lot of holidays-- but in so much excess. the cokeheads do meth and the alcoholics drink everclear. everyone tries harder to be worse. in a lot of ways, i feel like it's a very human way of trying to erase the idea of our own mortality.

the only thing more mortal than a birthday is new year's eve because it happens on the same day for everyone. and on that day we try to blank our minds with drugs and disco balls. we try to make so many mistakes that the most popular birthday in america falls exactly nine months afterward.

the worst part is the only logical part of our brains capable of comprehending the concept of our inevitable demise comes up with resolutions for the following year-- but we do it hammered. we get into drunken conversation about how we'll make sure the next year isn't as bad as the one we're leaving and then we shout ridiculous resolutions in our intoxicated, spitty, voice.

this year i will do fifty push-ups every day!

no you won't.

i mean you'll do it for like a week. and then you'll skip a day and your friends will give you shit and you'll say something about how they haven't held up their resolutions and have no right to judge. the way politicians win arguments, you know. and you'll do fewer and fewer push-ups till march, when you're doing none. maybe sometime in june, you'll think about your resolution and you'll do thirty push-ups one day. but then you'll give up and realize no one cares about your resolution anyway.

just as valentine's is a day for love and halloween is a day for fun-fear, new year's eve is a day for starting off the next annual with a glorious amount of excusable mistakes. and what an american way to begin.

here's my resolution-- one that i can promise:

i will poop my pants one time this year.

the most alarming part of that resolution is that you can't reasonably tell whether or not i'm saying i'll poop my pants because i never do, or if i'm saying i'll only do it once because i usually manage to do it fifteen times in a year.

but, both ways, that's a promise. it's bigger than a promise: it's a resolution.