Sometimes the memories we aquire of an annual event become enmeshed withi one another - it becomes difficult to remember what transpired on which year.  I tried the following exercise to see if I could remember what I did every year for New Years Eve and to try and figure out if there was any pattern for what made a good holiday and what made a bad one…

the year written indicates that the holiday was to celebrate the beginning of that year…

1998 - Sayville First Night - this was a weird thing my hometown on Long Island held where there were lots of high school bands playing and other things to prevent us from drinking.
grade:B

1999 - same thing, but this time it gets a C+

2000 - ah, the millennium.  Y2K.  I went with my friend Devin to his friend Joe’s house who was having a huge house party.  For the actual count-down I walked a few houses south to my friend Lily’s where they had a lit a fire in a garbage can on their front lawn.  Not long after I returned to Joe’s.  (Lily’s house was dry and Joe’s was wet)
grade: B+

2001 - ?????????????

2002 - Party at my friend Ian’s in Bayport, L.I.  I remember having a good time but there also being some drama at the party - I don’t remember what it was.  Drama. Drama.
grade: B

2003 - This was my first day residing in my first apartment in New York City - in Astoria.  These guys were my friends from college and we had a good time playing games and watching TV.  I don’t remember many details other than it was so dry that people wouldn’t have one of those chocolates that has brandy in it.
grade: B-

2004 - This year I started my New Year’s Eve off at Homer’s.  In 2004 his parents still lived in a Boerum Hill brownstone and they made a very nice dinner.  We then went to another friend’s family brownstone in Park Slope and played silly drinking games and went on to the roof and watched the fire works go off marking the beginning of 2004.  I remember taking a taxi home to Williamsburg and loving what I saw out the window at every stage of the way.
grade: A-

2005 - Again - this began at Homer’s parents’ house.  I think by this time they were living in Windsor Terrace.  There was no solid plan for the evening - we went to a party at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.  It was cool but sort of hard to get to and from.  Again the new year was rung in on a roof.  I remember getting many strange phone calls but from whom, I cannot recall.  Then we went to the East Village where Homer’s favorite dive bar was going to be making its last call.  This was not so fun - my first New Years on Manhattan Island.  Gross. This night dragged on and on with me and Homer’s girfriend Catherine fading out at around 4am, much before the last call.  The subway ride home was strange, but the next day on my train ride back to Long Island I remember how great 2005 looked.
grade: B

2006 - This was maybe my best New Years.  It started off by having dinner at my apartment with a bunch of people.  We then all split up and I went - with my friend Ralph - to my friend Ari’s brownstone in Prospect Heights.  I remember tying balloons with new year’s wishes and releasing them - that was really nice if a little environmentally irresponsible.  Around 1pm, Ralph and I went to our friend Jimmy’s loft space on the Gowanus Canal.  Huge huge party.  Music. Dancing.  A Coke machine that had cans of Rheingold in it.  I got home and tried to throw up but failed and fell asleep on the living room floor.  The next day I had to go to my father’s swearing in ceromony.  The bumpiness of the Long Island Railroad was not a good thing for my stomache.  I wanted to throw up so bad.  But I didn’t - I couldn’t.  When I got to Sayville, I drank a glass of Pepsi and let out a giant burp and I was hung over no more.
grade: A

2007 - New Year’s Eve was on a Sunday in 2006 and I went to my friend Katie’s bar to hang out for some cheap drinks and meet up with her fiance and his friends.  This was great, and when Katie got off at 9pm we walked over to Will’s old house over by Grand St. in Williamsburg.  He and his friends had lived in that house for years and they were kicked out so the building could be demolished and a condo built there.  The lease ran out on December 31.  The building was utterly abandoned - no power, no water and no heat.  We trashed what we could, scavanged what we wanted and went on to the neighbor’s roof to see the fireworks.  When we got up to the roof, an old man came at us with a knife  because he had heard our footsteps and thought we were burglers.  We calmed him down just as the new year 2007 struck.  There night went on with more exploring the abandoned building - which was freezing.  On the way back to the subway I bumped into a girl who lived on my floor in college.
grade: B

2008 - This New Year’s eve began by visiting my friend Ryan at his bar in Cobble Hill.  Then met up with Homer and Catherine at our friends’ apartment in Williamsburg.  There was some good dancing but I don’t remember anything memorable really happening.
grade: B-
so.
I can’t see a definite pattern with anything.  Who knows what makes a good New Years Eve? Not me, that’s for sure.  I think this year I should like to keep it low-key but I’d still like to party a bit, just because I’m excited for 2009.
If anyone reading this was with me New Years Eve 2000-2001, let me know what I did! I CANNOT REMEMBER.  Most of you reading this will assume because it was that AWESOME.  But more likely the case, I was sitting at home alone with a bag of Doritos and a 3 liter of Cherry Coke watching a Twilight Zone Marathon on the sci-fi channel.

http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2008/12/george_lucas_signs_off_on_star.html

You’d have to be an idiot not to have seen this one coming: George Lucas, beloved director and ever-watchful protector of the Star Wars brand, has officially given his blessing to Star Wars: A Musical Journey, a stage production featuring dancing Stormtroopers and singing Wookies, according to E! Online. The show will play London’s O2 arena next April with a European tour supposedly in the works. There’s currently no word on a Broadway run, but, given the available theater space and the recession-proof appeal of completely ridiculous nonsense (admittedly, we would probably pay money to see this), you’d have to expect that one is definitely inevitable. SW: AMJ will reportedly condense the boring, convoluted plots of all six Star Wars films down into a snappy, concise two hours, which actually makes us think that it could be sort of good, provided they focus primarily on the two non-shitty movies.

What the heck?  I thought this degradation was over.

I’ve been having recurring dreams about Osama bin Laden, in which I kill or capture him.  The natural question to ask is - ‘is this a call to action’?  I have enough money in my savings to purchase a plane ticket to Islamabad, buy equipment and guns and get to the border region where most people think bin Laden is hiding.

BUT if I want to do this thing right - there’s a series of general principals I must follow….

I think this journey has the potential for the transformation of my inner self and the world, both of which are in need of transformations.  The threat of death will be ubiquitous and the preparations will need be intense.  I will run out of money but the allure of the 25 million dollar reward will fade as I near my goal - the singleness of having a true goal.  I will have to avoid becoming too Byronic or becoming myself someone like the very man I intend to destroy.

Things to do before I go:

1. learn Urdu, Pashtun, and Arabic
2. learn to shoot
3. learn to stab

Today is the 145th anniversary of Lincoln delivering the Gettysburg Address.

It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

fuck yeah - let’s do it, let’s HIGHLY resolve that the American soldiers there shall not have died in vain.

Last night I was anxious and feeling underwhelmed when I went to sleep, maybe then it’s not surprising that I suffered a dream that preyed on those feelings.  I don’t know what to think about dream interpretation - I guess some of my dreams have meaning (they’re probably about sex even when they’re not about sex) - others are enjoyably bizarre but this one was not enjoyable but it was exhilarating.

I awoke in a sweat.  I was in a tent.  It was light outside, cool, but not cold.  There was the sound of people working outside in a camp.  I look down to discover two macabre sights.  The first were my hands - they had been severed, leaving stubs that already had had time to heal.  The other was a human head - the head of world’s most famous fugitive: Osama bin Laden.  His body was laying in the tent just a few feet away from me.  I did not know if I was a prisoner or if my presence in the camp was even known.  I just knew I had to get out of there and, for the twenty-five million dollars, I had to get this head out of there with me.  I knew how I arrived there but the memories came only if I thought about it - like remembering some book I had years ago, I don’t remember it now though.  I managed to wrap up the head in a rag with my stubs and hold it between my arm and my body on my left side.  I left the tent and snuck my way out of the camp.  Before I woke up, I remember sitting in an infinite desert wondering how I would make it back to an American Army base without being discovered or mistaken for a terrorist myself.

So I’ve done pretty much everything on my bucket list except for work on my web projects.  That is why I have not posted in a long time.  It’s time to start this up again.  There’s a new world to write about now and I have to take the bull by the horns.

I also really need to take another look at that resume and my job search strategy.

I loved the film The Bucket List in which Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicolson play terminal cancer patients who do all sorts of ridiculous stuff before they die.  Even though I am healthy and thus have a pretty good chance at making it out of the summer alive, I just wrote up a bucket list of my own - of things to do this summer.

1) go to Shea Stadium a lot
it’s their last season there, if I don’t go this summer I’ll miss out on an opportunity to get in a taste of the stadium where I saw my first baseball games for ever.  No more opportunities for nostalgia.

2)work on my web projects
there are a couple of websites I think would be awesome.  I have the content ready to go up on them but I still lack the know-how to make them look presentable.  At least that’s the excuse I keep giving myself.  www.cheapdateny.com and www.oldmandrinks.com  are both waiting to go, I just want them to be snazzy before I show them to people.

3)work on my resume
I just graduated from grad school and need to job hunt!

4) write a short story
I have a bunch of ideas of stories that I want to write.  I’ve never ever written fiction before so it’ll be totally new and different.  But I might as well start doing it - I think it’d be a ton of fun, and if someone actually would want to read it, that’d be all the better.  But - at first anyway - it’s really just for my own amusement.

5) go to Baltimore
A good friend of mine just moved down there and another one will move very soon, so it’s time for me to go south to Charm City and have a weekend of it - I haven’t been down there since last winter.

6) play more card games
I want to learn a couple of more but more importantly I want to play the games I already know more often.  Poker night anyone? Canasta?

7) Star Trek the Original Series
I’ve already started watching the first season. It’s so good - I can’t believe I’ve waited so long to watch all of these.  Now I can’t say I’m not a geek.

8 ) Fry a chicken
I did this last summer and it was so good.  I bought a organic chicken and now I’m just waiting for a day when it’s not too hot and I can get a bunch of people to come over to eat it with me.

these are all doable - I just need to rev myself up more!