Gini Koch’s New Years Confessions

Gini has some confessions to make about New Years Celebrations. The Funny Girl is on a roll.

Have a read for a little humor in the New Year.

Let us know what you think in the comments section below. As always we welcome your feedback and input on all of our published content. Than you for stopping by and spending time with us.

On a roll from sharing my deepest, darkest Christmas confessions, I decided to continue to alienate those around me by sharing what I really think of the events up to and around New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day. I realize that nobody actually ASKED for this information, but I’m going to provide it anyway, because I can.
I firmly and honestly believe:

*We put WAY too much pressure on January 1st. We’re all going to change our lives, the new year will be better (And, for the love of all that’s holy, please stop challenging each new year – saying “This year just HAS to be better than last year” is the calendar equivalent of daring an idiot to stick his tongue to a freezing flagpole. That idiot IS going to take that dare, and beldam IS going to ensue, and things are NOT going to get better, because after that tongue is ripped from the pole, the first words that year is going to say unintelligibly is “Hold my beer,” or “Challenge accepted!” So, just stop daring the Sucking 20s to get better, because we’re only 2 years into this miserable decade and it’s clear that this decade WANTS to be known as the Sucking 20s in the annals of history. So, stop it.), and all that jazz (and we’re back to the original point! Whee!) and clearly one turn of the clock is not, in reality, going to change a damn thing.

*That though they like to say that Valentine’s Day is Singles Awareness Day, not having someone to kiss at the stroke of midnight on December 31st is just as bad. Worse, really, because if you’re out, then everyone can note that you have no one to kiss or are not kissing. I’ve kissed many a toad at that stroke of midnight, just in case he turned into a prince and so I didn’t look pathetic. (Comments about that being pathetic will be aggressively ignored. Sure, that’s true, but I’m still ignoring you.) Having been happily married for a number of decades now means this concern is in my past, and yet every December 31st I make sure the hubs is going to stay awake or wake up AT 11:59pm so that we can kiss. I think that expectation is worse than Valentine’s Day (and the hubs really thinks it’s worse when it’s a “waking him up at 11:59” year) – at least on Valentine’s Day you can buy your own chocolates and enjoy them in the privacy of your own home without having to hear riotous celebrations from nearby or on TV.

*New Year’s Resolutions are the biggest waste of time known to civilization. They also create a feeling of failure no one needs. You want to lose weight? Pick any day that works to start. You want to stop smoking? Ditto. You want to learn a skill? Most classes for skills start on days OTHER than January 1st. And so on. Stop resolving to do anything other than be the best you that you can manage to be.

*Diaries are the biggest waste of paper known to civilization. Now, I know there are a LOT of people who use a diary (and, as TV and movies have shown us, that is ALWAYS, 100% of the time used against them, so why people persist I don’t know) and kudos to you managing to journal your thoughts, but, to me, it’s a lot of pressure to put on yourself and some bound paper. Do you REALLY need to know what you were thinking when you first saw that special someone? And do you really need to know when you first decided that special someone was “the one” or “your personal dumpster fire” or any point in between? I mean, I dated a lot, and I can remember most of the firsts and such, and I see no reason why any of them, up to and including the hubs, needed to be memorialized in a book with a set expiration date. This mindset is largely due to my having been given diaries a lot as a young’un and starting off bright and chipper in the first week of January and tapering off dramatically by the second week of January, thereby being stuck with a book that was useless for anything and which couldn’t even be re-gifted. I guess I could have taken notes in them, but my schedule was not all that full when I was 12, so they just gathered dust and told me I didn’t care enough to write.

*Calendars, on the other hand, are the greatest thing since sliced bread. I LOVE me my calendars. I can barely remember the time of day, let alone the day of the week, so without a calendar I would never be anywhere even close to on time. Plus, most come with pretty pictures or pithy sayings, or both, and the ones I get leave room for writing your actual appointments down. Some even have note taking sections! Calendars show me far more about my life than a diary ever has or ever will.

*The Rose Parade is great, but the farther I get from Southern California (where I grew up) the harder it is to care about it. In SoCal, there is a TV station that covers the parade without commercial interruption, then replays it with commercials for the rest of the day. I love that station. There is no station OUTSIDE of this one that’s willing to give that much TV time to the Parade. Meaning I’m expected to get up early to watch a broadcast that is not nearly as good as the one I grew up with. Pass. Hard pass. (The hubs still gets up every year, but then he’s far more of a traditionalist than I am. And I guess he likes to be able to complain about how bad the broadcast is compared to the one from SoCal.)

*Other than the Rose Parade and the Rose Bowl (which is only interesting if you care about either college football team playing or just live for college football – which many appear to, but I am definitely not among their number), there is literally nothing to do on New Year’s Day. Not much is open (and I can confirm this, having just had to search what seemed like every restaurant in the Greater Hotlanta Metro Area to find a place serving brunch or dinner on that day {entire availability in one of the U.S.’s top 10 cities by population? 6} in order to not have to cook) and that means there’s nothing to do. If you’re outdoorsy and your weather is not vile you can do outdoorsy things, I suppose. (My thoughts about outdoorsy things are something I’ll save for another time.) But there’s not a lot else going on. So, New Year’s Day is boring. It’s good if you’re hung over from NYE, but otherwise it’s a yawner of a way to start a year.

*The desire to go out to a fantastic NYE party like we see in TV and movies is normally outweighed by the ridiculous cost of attending, the need to have formalwear that you won’t catch your death in for the outside portions, the vast number of strangers also attending, and the fact that you won’t be able to hear the person or people you’re attending with because of all those strangers and the music and the general rowdiness. They look fun from the safety of your living room. They look like expensive work the moment you think about venturing out and joining in.

*I could put up with all of this IF ONLY there was a law passed outlawing fireworks. It’s bad enough on July 4th, but in Hotlanta it rains a LOT and so fireworks aren’t illegal here, but my pets are all from the Southwest where fireworks ARE illegal unless you’ve got big permits so they didn’t grow up with bombs bursting in air, and the megachurch that’s less than ¼ mile from my house does fireworks as if they are the only way Jesus can find us in order to have the second coming. The hysteria that ensues at the Manse due to fireworks is horrific and makes me hate everyone (especially those in charge at the megachurch) and everything that causes fireworks to be shot off. I also hate all my neighbors whose pets grew up next to that megachurch and who, therefore, add in to the megachurch’s efforts on a regular and never ending basis. There aren’t enough dog and cat sedatives in the WORLD on NYE at the Manse.

When we lived in Hell’s Orientation Area, we threw an annual NYE party and it was great. Here in Hotlanta, though, where the roads are anything other than straight, there are few to no streetlights, and it’s almost always raining or about to rain, folks don’t seem to want to go to a party and then have to drive home on, as a friend here puts it, Amateur Night. So, NYE here is not the same excitement that it was in the flat, non-rainy, well-lit straight streets desert. And maybe that’s why I’m much more down on the whole experience than I was in my carefree youthful (okay, carefree older than youthful but younger than doddering) days.
Or maybe it’s just a molehill we’ve all made into a gigantic, glitzy, resolution- and firework-filled mountain. Let me know what you think in your first diary entries of the new year.