are we there yet? it's not every day that a new year comes and goes. it's also not every day that you sit at a boba shop twenty minutes to twelve, semi-panicking about where you'll end up at at the stroke of midnight. my best new years are generally spent on the couch by myself. i prefer those to almost anything else actually. occasionally our family had a new year's party or two. the "party" portion of those nights consisted of tons of chinese parents karaoking and then singing "auld lang syne" in varying degrees of accents, albeit always in full unison. this tradition is strangely festive and really captures the spirit of new years. i spent last new year's eve counterfeiting counterfeit money and watching james take his pants off. that was pretty fun.

sadly, my main concern at the turn of the back half of this decade is whether or not to start a yahoo account for all of my upcoming 2006 pictures. i mean, it's kind of illogical to double back and have another january folder right? won't that be confusing when twenty years from now i'm left wondering if my yahoo folder contained two separate januarys or just lots of excitement from one january? these are the types of things that i worry about for new years.

i "forgot" again to send out christmas cards to people. this is two or three years running where i've actually gone out to buy cards and then watched as the date for writing in those cards came and went. so i guess i wish everyone a merry christmas, and a happy holiday season. next year i'm biting jon g's idea and doing it all electronically. if you can cordially blue mountain birthday wishes, surely electronic christmas cards are the wave of the future.

this may have been the fastest approaching and shooting by holiday season ever. maybe i/we should have commemorated it better somehow, but i think a few hours of pictionary was definitely the way to go this year. that plus we were in a car again, on the freeway, as the new year actually happened. that's three times that's happened to me now. pretty spectacular. i wonder if they play the mexican national anthem at midnight on new years, or if they go with something more new years-y. they play the mexican national anthem (instrumental) at midnight on most am radio stations around here. sadly, i forgot to check this year while i was driving, thus leaving me with another unanswered question for 2007.

i'm pretty excited about 2006. for one, it'll mark the publishing (cross your fingers) of my eventual book. i'm not sure if i've written this here before. but i'm writing -- nay, scribbling -- a book. it's non-fiction and not based on anything involving me so much. but it's still a book. the due date is coming up very soon and once that is all figured out, i'll know if i have more books to write, or if i'm off again to the land of menial labor and awesome white collar administrative jobs. by the way, i'm twenty eight in 2006. keep it real. my cousins who are far younger than me are getting lucrative jobs/careers and angling for truly higher education degrees. people in my immediate peer grouping have titles that contain the word "senior" in their job descriptions. as in "senior mananger" or "senior accountant" and what have you. i still sleep in till two. the only thing i've got is an unshakable case of senioritis.

but life is good. i feel like this is gonna be a huge year for me. some serious friends are getting seriously married. i've got all the job prospects and financial security of an eighteen year old. i've got framed posters on my wall (wood frames, not plastic). i've got an ipod and a laptop. i've got just the right number of email to phone to hang out to random buddies.

i've given up cuddle buddying as a personal way of life, but never as a philosophy. i stupidly ordered tiny child size cuddle buddy bracelets by the way. if anyone has extremely small wrists, i have a lot of glow in the dark bands for you.

the final path towards fantasy football glory continues to be an elusive one, maybe next year. i somehow never learned that one space after a period was perfectly acceptable. thanks to 2005, now i know that one space is just as good as two. my entire litany of relationship ideas and rants is undergoing extreme and rigourous testing, results still inconclusive (also, if "nobody" or "no one" is reading this, please email me, thanks).

perhaps most important of all, i've learned to hang out with myself a bit, even if it's only for a few hours at a time in a movie theatre. that counts as by myself right?