End of A Year Gone Bad

I am working on my newspaper piece for January. It will have the same title and I am putting off real work, hoping to drum up ideas for the piece.

I personally love New Years and I am looking forward to it. It is the end and the beginning, and only has as much meaning as you want to give to it. Which for most people simply involves staying up late and getting drunk. I admire it for it's simplicity and directness.

This is the perfect opportunity to look back on all the things you wished you had done over the past year, the accomplishments of you and your peers, perhaps finish some loose ends before the opportunity to affect change this year draws to a close forever. This is the time to take an inventory of you life as you lived it and compare it against how you wanted to live it.

There are no fresh starts in life, all the baggage you had in 2008 will carry over to 2009. But for a brief couple of days, the year seems crisp and new and the possibilities endless as if you had been reborn.

I also like tax season. You get to see how you spent your time over the past year, how you earned and spent your money. Everything gets summed up on a few pieces of paper and collected by the government.

Your entire year's work, collected, processed and forgotten.

Here is to looking back on all the crap the last year threw at us, and a wish for better times ahead.