"A New Year: Big fucking whoop" and other optimistic musings

I've never seen the point of celebrating New Years; I love the chance to get wasted and fire off explosives into the faces of small children as much as the next person, but celebrating the fact that another cycle in our method of measuring time has begun is as much fun as doing your taxes. If doing your taxes ends with your lying in a puddle of your own vomit. So doing taxes, basically. Yet every New Years eve I dress up in something shiny, buy the bastard child of champagne and mountain dew and run around yelling "Happy New Years!", mostly because people won't talk to me when I yell "Happy new step towards our impending death-day!". The thought of becoming a hermit is becoming more and more appealing. This is what happens when you are so bored that you try to reenact all scenes from Der Üntergang using only your cats and a homemade bunker made out of a laundry basket. I might have a problem.

However, this New Year's Eve made me think: why are we so obsessed with rebirth? Every single New Year, we promise ourselves to work out more, eat more vegetables, breathe less, get promoted - and yet every year, we get disappointed. I mean, what are the chances that I, a whisky-drinking, exercise-resenting, marzipan-binging history-geek, will just wake up January 1st 2013 and feel inclined to start eating beets and paying machines to violate me at the gym? Why not make New Year's resolutions that we actually might fulfill, such as "I promise to breathe on a regular basis" or "I promise to keep a strict diet consisting mainly of quesadillas and cinnamon buns", or "I promise to start hiding bodies in less noticeable places" if you're a serial killer. I don't want to exclude anyone.

Basically, what I want to say is that celebrating a new year is merely celebrating the fact that we are one more step closer to death, and one step away from everything wonderful; wonderful things like Victorian corsets, the roaring 20's, Clark Gable, French artists sipping absinthe in cafés, happy prostitutes and sexy dandies with less-sexy syphilis.

Hang on, Sherlock season 3 is due December 2013. Ignore this entire post, there is hope for the future! HAPPY NEW YEAR, SIMPLE MINIONS!