New Year's Retrospective 2019

Happy New Year! I drank too much last night and I haven't felt 100% today, but it was nice and relaxing. thosesocks invited me and some other people over for a quiet day listening to folk music and eating cheese. I made zenzai, traditional Japanese red bean New Year's soup, and thosesocks made tea for us all, and now I'm at home with a wood-wick candle burning and watching Reverse Angle's take on the 1998 Godzilla.

It's been a good year. On Facebook, I wrote:

I went into 2019, teeth barred and a knife behind my back, ready to immediately start stabbing the moment it looked like anything was threatening.

Three, maybe four months in, I put the knife down and kept walking, and I haven't felt the lack.

People repeatedly tell me how different I am. How I seem like an almost completely different person than I used to. They tell me that I'm more social than they could have imagined even for themselves, and ask me how I have the energy to do it. My *sister* told me that she was jealous of my social life and asked me for my secret, and let me tell you, that was the day that Hell froze over.

At my last party, people kept asking me "How do you know all these people!?"

The story of the last decade was, I suppose, of being a plant in a glass bottle. I had plenty of light and water, but when I hit the edge of the bottle I just stopped growing and I figured that was the limit of the world. When in 2018 the glass shattered, I thought that it was a world-ending disaster...but it actually let me grow in ways I hadn't thought were previously possible.

In 2019 I made a bunch of new friends. I started dating again. I put down the video games that have defined my life for thirty years because I *don't have time to play* because I'm too busy seeing people, going to theatre shows, watching movies at friends' houses, and going to museums. I am, in other words, a new man.

So, bring on the roaring 2020s. Give me neon noir, synthwave jazz, electric-blue cocktails in dingy speakeasies, black trenchcoats with collars turned up against climate-change-induced polar vortices, and, hopefully, a story I can start with "And then she walked in." I am more than ready

So there's a good summary of my year! It was a great year overall.

The song that defined my 2018 was "Dynasty," by Miia:

Watch on YouTube

The scar I can't reverse
When the more it heals the worse it hurts
Gave you every piece of me, no wonder it's missing
Don't know how to be so close to someone so distant

And all I gave you is gone
Tumbled like it was stone
Thought we built a dynasty that heaven couldn't shake
Thought we built a dynasty like nothing ever made
Thought we built a dynasty forever couldn't break
Up

But the song that defined 2019 was "Gorgeous" by Illenium:

Watch on YouTube

Sometimes I gotta pinch myself
Oh, gorgeous
Hello today
Well let me introduce myself
Oh, gorgeous

All those days that passed me by
I can’t believe I’m still alive
They say you need the dark to shine
It’s like I can see for the first time
And it’s gorgeous

It was a good year.

Here's my answers for the traditional New Year's forty questions meme:

( Forty questions )