Drinking is a way of ending the day. - Ernest Hemingway

Evidently, it's a relatively universally-prized way of ending the year, as well.

My best friend and I realized this year that spending New Year's Eve together has become an a posteriori tradition of ours. It's been years since either of us watched the ball drop at all, much less with someone with whom we were involved. We make an event of getting ready, slither into our slinkiest dresses and our faux-Manolos (which this year occasioned a feisty ass-size comparison, adjudicated by Morgan's long-suffering roommate) and indulge outrageously in the opportunity to be fabulous. For me, this past New Year's Eve was my first grownup night out with old friends in my hometown in half a year, during which I learned a new language, lived with four different families on a different continent, almost visited Africa, got into the Peace Corps, witnessed my mother's incipient nervous breakdown, swore off sex completely and then fell off the wagon (several times), moved on, and thought about myself far too much.

It was so, so good to come home. And have a drink.

We had dinner at one of my favorite Memphis restaurants, a place downtown called Lolo's Table, that was served in courses, delicious without doubt, but (for me) unsatisfyingly French. (An utterly personal issue resolved by the utterly excellent bread pudding at the end, which doesn't exist in France, and the free champagne, which also helped to numb the shock of how much the whole business cost. I won't note it here, because there's a chance my parents might read this, and I refuse to precipitate their heart palpitations any more than I do already.) I discovered that I had completely forgotten the solicitous dispatch of American waiters; it was almost unnerving to have our pleasant server take any notice of us after the food had arrived. And of course I ordered and tasted the wine with the adroit smugness that is, I firmly maintain, the right of the hapless etudiante returning from France.

Martinis at Swig (damn, they can make them dry), champagne at Tsunami (also the location of the obligatory accidental encounter with the Preppy Posse, who insist on travelling in packs and which includes an ex whom I still can't decide if it was good to see), and hours later I woke up on the first morning of the New Year on Morgan's futon, mercifully in pajamas but still wearing makeup, with her cat purring on my chest and my fingers curled around what proved to be my earrings from the night before. Fumbling over the coffee table for my watch, I noticed the cracker-crumbs strewn in joyous confetti-profusion on the floor; I dragged my eyes up to the squashy remnants of cheese and the overturned box of rosemary-and-olive-oil Triscuits bedecking the table, and a vague memory of feasting sometime after five am surfaced, blearily.

After we cleared away the celebratory detritus of two single twentysomething girls (okay, I cleared, he mewed until I located the Friskies) and efforts both to figure out the coffeemaker and to rouse Morgan proved equally ineffectual, Smokey and I repaired to the porch and curled up together on the glider. I remember when she bought it, a hundred years ago, in Mississippi, and I've sat on it through many states of mind. I tucked my feet underneath me, lit a cigarette, and stared through the screens down towards the New Year's Monday morning traffic on Poplar.

Ever since I got back from France, it's seemed to me that everyone drives at breakneck speed. Granted, I was terrified continually in France - one quite literally takes one's life in one's hands both as cyclist and pedestrian, because they've no intention of stopping for you. Perhaps it's because I'm driving myself again - I'm still not used to it, and I'm as childishly excited every time I go out to my car as a sixteen-year-old with new-minted keys and a license still warm from the laminator.

I wondered if there's ever a time in your life when you find yourself about where you thought you'd be, a year ago. And I wondered how I'd feel about it, if I found myself at such a moment. And, if I thought of myself as a purposeful individual, what it meant that my life was such a continual surprise.

By ten am on the first day of 2007, I had already shamelessly disowned my resolution to think less about myself.


we don't know, so we wait for tomorrow
we don't know, so we wait for tomorrow

we don't know, so we only go forward

- tegan and sara

Choices scattered in front of me like cracker-crumbs. Cleaning up messes I could only hazily remember making. Wondering if this year will be an auspicious one, and swallowing the awareness that I've no idea where I'll be, next time.

Too much, on an empty stomach.

The only way to digest it all, if your hometown is the birthplace of the blues, is to drag your closest friend out of bed and let her take you out for breakfast at one in the afternoon. The achingly enormous existential thorniness of your twenties, you find, is smoothed down quite satisfactorily by biscuits and gravy, diner coffee in the heavy white mug, and cheese grits.


Sometimes too much to drink is barely enough. - Mark Twain