Happy New Year! Welcome to my confetti of 2012 NaBloPoMo Posts. You're welcome.

I have never been good at New Year's.

I am so bizarrely immune to normal human ceremony that by the time I was ten, it was already a farce to me. In fact, I developed a whole spontaneous stand-up routine on New Years' Eve of 1985, probably due to the fact that ten year-olds allowed up past midnight act like mental patients. But my mom thought it was hilarious. "Yes, it's a NEW day! Everything is...new! I can see things...in a new way...My pants, my shirt, my hair...all NEW!" 

I don't get it.

It's a day. Maybe the problem is that it's just too Gregorian for me. I totally get Winter Solstice, because something actual is taking place. The light is actually shortest on that day and. following it, light actually returns. Conversely, the fact that a ball drops in a city I have never visited, I have to buy all new calendars, and  I am supposed to stay awake until after midnight with sleep-deprived children is arbitrary and irritating.

Photo by Le Simon Pix

Wait, there's more. I don't make resolutions. I don't make them because my promise is golden. Let me repeat that. It. Is. Golden. And if I want to make a goddamned change in my life, I see no reason to wait until January 1 to do it with ceremony and then bail on it later. 

So, basically, I'm a party-pooping, joy-killing asshole. Just the person you wanted to hear from on new beginnings. Yay!

All that being true, I do have a major new beginning to write about. 

At some point in the past few months, I started to call myself a writer. More importantly, I started to think of myself as a writer. And I haven't really thought of myself that way since I was a teenager. Having three children has been such an absorbing project for me that for the first thirteen years of the adventure, I have really done nothing but itemize my cupboards and try to find their hidden socks. I don't know how or why this switch was tripped in me, but at some point last year, I decided I wanted to be an actual person again. 

It turns out that person is a writer.

Therefore, when the ball drops and all that confetti falls on those brave souls in New York City, imagine for yourself the deluge of words you are about to fall under in 2012, now that I've got my groove back. Sorry. But, you know, you don't have to stand there. 

Happy 2012! Unless we all totally get wiped off the face of the earth. In which case, there's no more reason for me to worry about learning to use Twitter and we can all relax a little.

Here's to all of us expressing the unmitigated unadulterated bejeezus out of our creative selves this coming year, doing whatever it is that makes our hearts sing. You in?