New Year’s Tuesday questions, Tempur-Pedic edition
I don’t remember much about the New Year’s Eve party I have in mind.
Which makes it sound much more fun than it was.
I don’t recall which year it was, I think either 1997 or 1998. I was back in my hometown on a break from school, and one of my best friends from high school invited me to a party she and her boyfriend were throwing at his house in the nearest big city. And so, delighted at the prospect, I drove an hour and a half to attend.
I’m not entirely sure quite what went wrong. Fond of my friend as I was (and remain), it was pretty apparent when I got there that she was much more interested in spending time with her new friends (none of whom I knew) than putting me at ease with an unfamiliar crowd. And I knew nobody there but her and her boyfriend.
What’s weird to me now as I think back is that normally this wouldn’t really have been a problem for me. Like my good friend, I’m pretty much 100% extrovert. Getting to know people has never posed much of a challenge, and I don’t typically require much hand-holding at social events. But for some reason I didn’t click with that crowd.
It probably didn’t help that the only thing to drink was an endless supply of some wretchedly cheap beer that I had no interest in quaffing.
At some point I ended up in a den or living room of some sort, in which was a large TV playing “Showgirls.” If I ever get around to writing a post on entertainments so terrible they’re amazing, “Showgirls” will figure prominently. But a necessary element of enjoying such gloriously awful entertainments is company that shares your sensibilities. Camp is not a solitary pleasure. I think there may have been one other person who drifted in to watch, but since I had no idea if he’d find my commentary on Elizabeth Berkley’s hilariously un-erotic sex scene with Kyle MacLachlan enjoyable or not I sat in bummed-out silence.
Eventually I fell asleep on the couch. When I awoke the next morning, I gave my polite goodbyes and left.
It was the lamest New Year’s Eve I have ever spent.
Luckily, I’ve spent many wonderful New Year’s Eves since. I have great memories of ringing in both 1999 and 2000. But something about such an utterly lackluster holiday experience demystified New Year’s Eve for me a bit. I don’t feel any sense of pressure to have an especially exciting night. In fact, given my choice of which holiday to take call, I will always opt for New Year’s Eve first.
The Better Half and I got a very nice bottle of champagne as a gift this year, so we may well pop it open tonight. But it wouldn’t surprise me at all if we call it an evening well before midnight and go to bed. Maybe some parents of small children still manage to raise the roof on New Year’s, but I’d just as soon we ready for my usual early AM wakening. Perhaps when the kids are older we’ll start making plans again, but for the foreseeable future New Year’s Eve will be pretty low-key.
So that’s this week’s Question — first of all, are tonight’s festivities something you’re looking forward to, or are you in the same boat as me? Does a mellower New Year’s Eve signal the same kind of life transition as it seems to have for us, or do you still raise a ruckus? And am I just old and boring, or should I hope for a hoopla renaissance one of these days?
Asleep by 9:30, baby!
(Though I do plan to be tipsily asleep)Report
Mellower for sure. I am going to a friend’s house for a party. It is French themed and she said the French do a seafood thing for the New Year. There will be Champagne, Oysters, and Caviar. The last time I celebrated New Years before this was maybe 2008 turning to 2009. I went to Brown Sugar Kitchen* with my best friend, and then we hung out in Berkeley, had dinner together, and watched Eastern Promises. Her car got stuck in my garage because some drunk guy illegally parked and we needed to have his car towed.**
*Really good soul food/fried chicken and waffles place in Oakland that is in the middle of a warehouse district. They are open from 7 AM to 3 AM but get a destination crowd.
**I guess the illegal parker could have been a womanReport
Make that 7 AM to 3 PM. That makes more sense. They go for the lunch crowd or at least did the last time I was there which was with LeeEsq in 2010 or 2011 or so.Report
Brown Sugar Kitchen
Great place. A foodie friend introduced it to me a few years ago.Report
I’ve never really done a wild New Year’s in my life. My favorite one was a few years ago, where I spent the night drinking beer with my best friend at a really good beer hall in my neighborhood. The worst one was a party I attended with ND when I was in law school. It wasn’t so bad but we were the only single people there and when all the couples did that kiss at midnight night thing, I felt like a stranger. The party was otherwise fine, a civilized affair.Report
I don’t remember this party.
How about NYE 2004-2005 when we were in Paris and danced with Hasidic Jews under the Eiffel Tower and then got into that stupid fight on the River Seine because you were drunk and I was feeling tired and grumpy and decided to pick a fight. You kissed the hand of some random German girl, she and her friends seemed amused.Report
That was a very fun New Year’s I admit that. I got very drunk though. That was probably the wildest New Year’s ever.Report
That’s an awesome story. I hope it’s true and not a joke.Report
Its a true story.Report
Awesome. I see you two in a whole new light.Report
Excellent. This is what brothers ought to be doing. Oh, except for actually hooking up with the German girl.
Although I must admit, the fleeting kiss has a touch of romance to it all on its own.Report
@burt, I normally wouldn’t have done that but I consumed a great deal of wine and champagne at that point. I was probably the most drunk I’ve ever been in my life. Except the time, ND and I went for a New Year’s Day brunch at the house of a friend of his. I also ingested some hashish. Than we went back to his place and I had a really good, deep sleep.Report
@leeesq that ending to the story sucks. Let’s try again.
“Yes, my brother and I were squabbling, about nothing important, but we’d had a bit too much to drink. And then I saw her, on New Year’s Eve, just as we wandered across the bridge to the Trocadero. Oh, she was ravishing, that German girl. I picked her out from her friends, kissed her hand, and looked at her eyes. They lit up like fire, with the surprise and delight and promise of the new year itself. And then her friends laughed and swept her away, down into the Metro. All we had was that one moment… I wonder where she is now. I am sure that she is still beautiful, and if she ever thinks of the American boy who, if only for just a passing moment in Paris, loved her.”Report
@leeesq
That was a Christmas Day party.Report
I don’t recall having a bad new years eve, although I’m sure I have. Most of mine are unexciting, and in the last few years, my s.o. and I usually just go to bed before midnight.
I used to go karaoke’ing with friends. We rented a room and there was usually a good mix of people. It was fun.Report
For about the last four years, we’ve gotten together with some old friends at their place in VA, which has worked out very well for us all – the kids play with each other (well, until last year, they played near each other, but you know the drill), we drink some champagne and catch up, eat some finger foods, get the kids to bed, and then play board games while drinking some more champagne and watching the ball drop, then catching up for a few hours more before going to bed around 2.
This year, they’re coming up to our place, but otherwise, I expect the drill will be the same, and that will again make it one of my favorite nights of the year. Even better – they’re bringing something from the bakery near their house, which is officially my favorite bakery in the world.
Of course, dealing with children on 5 or so hours’ sleep isn’t ever a lot of fun, but that’s a small price to pay to spend a little more time with friends.Report
Oh, and best New Year’s ever isn’t even a contest: 2000/2001. My new girlfriend and I went with friends to some overcrowded, overpriced restaurant in Manhattan around Battery Park. Other than my two friends, we knew nobody, which didn’t matter much because it wasn’t like it was possible to hold a conversation. Yet the cab ride back to the apartment where we were staying, when we were complaining about how horrible the experience had been, was the moment we each realized that we had fallen in love. Needless to say, that girlfriend is now my wife of almost 9 years.
As for wildest New Year’s ever…..I’ve had my share of those, too. But the wildest would have been the Milennium the preceding year – I had a bunch of my college and high school friends over my house, as well as some random friends of friends of friends. I think the wildness is best summed up by the fact that one of my friends wound up sitting by himself in a chair in the middle of the basement having a full on argument….with himself. Though the various subsequent New Year’s Eves at various Irish pubs in the DC Metro area are all tied for a close second.Report
I love that first story.Report
We’re visiting Mom in NH at the moment, and I figure we’ll be up until probably 11ish. We might stay up to see the ball drop, might not.
It depends on whether or not the kiddo is reasonable being up late or wants to go to bed early.
On the bright side, we’ve got some nice t-bone steaks, etc for an excellent NYE dinner.Report
I grew up thinking of tonight as a night for family and friends, and I still do. Occasionally that means an Occasion, but usually it means something more comfortable and intimate. So I’ll be sacked out on the couch at some friends’ house, watching a monster movie marathon. We’ll miss Jaybird, but other than that it should be lovely. I’ll be up till around 1 or so.
The one thing I have found a bit difficult as I get older is that I often want to be at several different New Years’ Eve celebrations, and the throwing of said celebrations is often determined at the last minute among our various circles of friends. Having tried the flit-from-one-to-the-next approach and hated it, I now usually accept the first one offered and suggest alternate plans to everyone else. It’s nice having so many dear friends, but if you’d told me as a teenager that my most common social difficulty would be juggling conflicting invitations from people I love who love me too, I’d have thought you’d mixed me up with someone else.Report
I’m not much of a wild partier in general, so most of New Years celebrations are pretty tame. But 17 years ago, on the current site of UO’s Matthew Knight Arena, daughter #1 was conceived. Probably my best New Year’s celebration ever.Report
Oddly the gay bars in Minneapolis have a tradition of putting money of different size denominations in baloons and dropping them on the dance floor at the turn of the New Year. Overwhelmingly 1’s of course but many 5’s some tens and twentys, a few fifties and a couple hundreds. I would never go out into the press under the baloons myself but I have many a fond new year memory of hearing the countdown and watching an ocean of cash hungry hands rising in the flickering lights (with many a custom pointy manicure or set of falsies for the occasion) in anticipation of the drop. Odd I don’t recall much violence after, just a lot of wild dancing.
This year, however, I’m 35 and it’s supposed to be -11 F with high winds so I’m going to a friends New Years shindig instead.Report
“What’s weird to me now as I think back is that normally this wouldn’t really have been a problem for me. Like my good friend, I’m pretty much 100% extrovert. Getting to know people has never posed much of a challenge, and I don’t typically require much hand-holding at social events. But for some reason I didn’t click with that crowd.”
I’m going to pushback a bit against the perception that extroverts do not sometimes have social difficulties. I don’t think it is as much related to shyness or social skills, but rather is about how we derive energy. This comic sums it up nicely: http://www.geeksaresexy.net/2013/07/15/a-guide-to-understanding-introverts/
I sometimes find myself in social situation where I am not eager to be. We all do. Even if we crave social interaction, we want that interaction to be positive. Being surrounded by people we don’t like or struggle to otherwise connect with does not meet the extrovert’s needs.
To the meat of your question, we are similarly situated and have been for some time. I never got all the NYE hype. When living in NYC, I remember thinking, “You mean I can spend five times as much money to hang out at the same bar I do every weekend with twice as many people? No thanks.” There is so much pressure to make the night special that it so rarely lives up to the hype. By chance, last night was actually our first night sleep training the brat, which actually went far smoother than anticipated (fingers crossed!).
In general, I’ve settled into a more… mature?… form of raising the roof. I still occasionally like to go out hard, but it is not like what it once was. And I’m far more likely to do what I did at my friend’s holiday party on Friday… a couple well-mixed cocktails and a cigar while sitting around the fire pit and home in time for a decent wakeup… than a raging blackout fest.
Call it getting old or getting boring, but I’m pretty content all-in-all.Report
Random contributions, in reverse order:
And am I just old and boring, or should I hope for a hoopla renaissance one of these days?
Between Jack’s birth and Hannah hitting five, our late-night activities were largely dominated by “somebody needs to get up” consequences.
Now that Hannah is old enough to comprehend “don’t wake up Mommy and Daddy unless it is an emergency” *and* she’s old enough to fix her own breakfast, that consequence has lessened.
Thus has our participation in post-10pm activities entered a Renaissance. So it’s not outside the realm of possibility.
Does a mellower New Year’s Eve signal the same kind of life transition as it seems to have for us, or do you still raise a ruckus?
I can say that ruckus-raising is still in the cards occasionally, yes.
Are tonight’s festivities something you’re looking forward to, or are you in the same boat as me?
‘Twas an event to look forward to, albeit with different glasses than when I was 25.
To share another random:
My most memorable New Year’s was in Las Vegas. Not because it was particularly memorable or awesome otherwise, but standing on the Las Vegas strip with approximately nine gazillion people when a solid 10% of them were throwing empty bottles of champagne 20’ in the air to watch them explode upon contact with the asphalt was certainly a mesmerizing experience.Report
Our daughter (now 3 years old) generally out-parties us. At my wife’s birthday party, after the last few guests left around 1 AM, she was asking where all the party people were.
Last year for NYE we went to a five day hippy dippy festival thingy. It was a great thing to do with a kid – one of the official volunteer rosters, alongside kitchen duty, setup and cleanup, was kids’ activities and general child-minding. If we both wanted to attend a workshop at the same time, we just let the volunteers know where we’d be and when one of us would be back. There were hordes of kidlets there, most of whom had children-of-hippies levels of independence and confidence. I’m not sure how late our kid was up dancing, but it was certainly past midnight.
(we went to a similar thing put on by the same crew for the autumnal equinox this past year, on the last night of which the kid ended up sleeping from 7 PM till midnight, then waking up and coming out dancing and partying until 4 or 5 in the morning)
This year we went to a much more low-key party at a friend’s house. The kid was even in bed not much after 10 – not surprising, as we’d taken the train back from visiting our parents the night before, so no one had slept properly. She was up before anyone else in the house was ready to move, but was happy to watch cartoons and eat cereal for a while as everyone else slept in.Report