No parties at my house - my parents are not party people, so I celebrated New Years the same way I do every year - at 11:00, watching the ball drop on Times Square. This year I gave up Dick Clark and Jay Leno and was comforted by the sweet embrace of Anderson Cooper and Kathy Griffin on CNN. I wonder how many people watched that - it was about as surreal a piece of television as I've ever seen. They were in NY, but covering New Years around the country - in New Orleans, Las Vegas, and probably somewhere in the Pacific time zone. There was this one guy in a restaurant on Bourbon Street who made crab cakes especially for Anderson even though Anderson was unfortunately in NY. Also it was hilarious to see the CNN guy in New Orleans move through all the extremely drunk and shouting into the camera revelers on Bourbon Street. There were other bizarre happenings - more than I expected; I was only watching the show intermittently and sometimes flipping between that and C-SPAN which was repeating Obama's election night victory speech. (Which was interesting in itself - I feel even more strongly now that it was NOT a victory speech. It was far too sober for that. I actually kinda felt bad for Obama, because there is no escape now from his mighty burden.)
I was hearing fireworks all night from my bedroom so a bit before midnight I walked down to the neighborhood park to see what would happen. Heard a lot of fireworks - I think some folks were setting off firecrackers at my old elementary school. There was clearly a party on the other side of the subdivision, complete with a bad trombone rendition of Auld Lang Syne. To the southeast people were setting off fireworks close by. I could see them light up the sky. To the south were many more fireworks but much farther away, although I could sometimes see their pretty lights peek above the horizon. Orion and Canis Major were high and bright in the sky, although Canopus far to the south was covered by clouds.
Some people do New Years resolutions. They never seem to work out, so I'm too lazy to bother. I don't really expect 2009 to be a terribly good year, either for me or for our country. For me, the terrifying specter of graduation and my crashing into George Bush's economy are closer than ever. For our country, George Bush's economy will not magically go away under Obama. George Bush's Iraq and Afghanistan (now there's a clusterfuck) aren't going anywhere. You can make your own list of problems, etc. Maybe Obama will be able to do something about these problems, or maybe the country will merely have old wine in new bottles. I favor the former interpretation - Obama will certainly try to alleviate these problems. The country clearly wants him to succeed. But there are the opposing forces, and we'll get to those some other time.
This is the start of my 31 posts in 31 days. So if that Muslim fails, at least you'll always have these posts to comfort you. Let the good times roll.
Tomorrow: I review Scott McClellan's book, What Happened, which I got for Christmas!
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I had forgotten just how many stars there are. I was out in the country with some of my brother's friends, and we mysteriously traveled close to my great grandmother's farm on I-10 from Rosenberg to launch fireworks. Too bad I can't recall looking at the stars and feeling like the events here are insignificant.
ReplyDeleteThe new year seems will hopefully be the dawn of better circumstances as far as our nation is concerned. I see that Obama has quite a bit of opportunity to make things better, but it will also be quite a struggle to get there, as you say. I look forward to reading about what those things are in detail.