A New Year

Two months since my last post! Well, I'm nothing if not predictable in my inability to stick to a regular schedule with this thing. 

So this seems like a pretty arbitrary day to declare the first of the year. It makes more sense to me to make the day after Yule the first day of the year - the first day that the sun is coming back. But that would make the first of the year the 22nd or 23rd and that's irregular and weird and humans don't like irregular weird things, for the most part. 

In any case, I have a love/hate relationship with this time of year. The holiday season is hard when you've lost people you love. Or if you have any kind of expectations about how it should go. I am not a particularly expressive person when it comes to showing my affection for others, so I enjoy this time of year, where I can be a little gushy and buy little gifts and say "hey, hang out with me" without fear of appearing too much like a needy human with emotions. 

Me, the other eleven months. 

I love the lights everywhere and the general sense of goodwill and merriment that abounds, not to mention the forty-two metric fucktons of fudge, cookies and other treats that have are absolutely everywhere for the entire month of December. It's actually a relief to have it behind me now so I can go back to getting most of my nutrition from vegetables, fruit and meat instead of subsisting entirely on sugar and butter. My body has certainly had enough of my gluttony and is anxious to get back to normal living. 

In any case, I've been thinking about the new year and the concept of resolutions and how every year my resolutions seem to echo the same themes. Eat better, exercise more, learn something new, go somewhere different, love myself more. This year will bring the same resolve to generally treat myself and others as kindly as I can. It seems pathetic to always have more or less the same goals, but I think it's okay, because these aren't things you can do once. It's a life thing. My goal is to become more and more patient and kind and accepting until I am the zen freaking master and things like Excel refusing to allow me to copy and paste non-adjacent cells won't reduce me to furious tears of frustration. 

Emotions are tricky things that tend to drive me to do ill-advised things. Sending out messages I probably shouldn't. Responding to messages I probably shouldn't. Thinking about people who don't think about me; missing the company of someone who dumped me with a text message. 

I have become pretty good over the years at ignoring painful emotions - 

(really? you gained a pant size this year, Kay) 

- but this is the time of year where they seem to all come to the forefront, wanted or no, and a crying jag that has been avoided for several months decides it's been ignored long enough and by the gods you're gonna take care of some long-overdue feeling today. 

This is a good thing, by and large. For emotionally stunted people such as myself it's good to have it come out. I'm not someone who enjoys feeling sad. That's normal, right? Who enjoys feeling sad? After a few minutes of wallowing in negative emotions, I'll shake myself loose and wipe my face and remind myself that it doesn't do any good to be all miserable and despairing. It serves no purpose and makes my face puffy. 

But I think this year, along with all my usual goals/resolutions/hopes/wishes, I'll try giving myself a break. I think we all have a tendency to be pretty hard on ourselves. Expecting perfection and never achieving it is exhausting, after all. So I think I'll try being kinder to myself as well as others, and see how that works. 

I'll start with being okay with the choices I have made, even the stupid and ill-advised ones. Sometimes you have to just do the probably-stupid thing. There's a certain power in the phrase, What have I got to lose? Because the answer is almost always not much. There might be something great to gain, and you'll never know unless you just put it out there. 

January is named after Janus, the Roman god of doorways, gates, beginnings, transitions. He's the two-faced god, looking forward and backward. There's a good page of info about him here. Fun fact: the doors to the temple of Janus were only closed when Rome was at peace. In the entire history of the Roman empire, they were closed about six times. 

Looking forward to this new circuit around the sun, we shall see what the year has in store. I think it could be pretty great. 

Or, a horrible shitstorm. You never know.