Happy New year

I spent New Year's Eve with my family because it felt like one of those things that I wished I'd done more of when looking back 10 years from now. Or maybe not. I love the little reading room at my grandma's house. I love how spacious it feels when it's probably 2x3m at most, and I love looking at the old books that's worn with countless reads, you can tell that every single page in that room has been turned and read. I ended up re-reading Never Let Me Go and a book about the universe. It kind of defeats the purpose of having a family gathering to curl up into the loneliest corner of the house and reading all night but I had a tough time staying awake at the dinner table where food kept rolling in (I get sleepier and sleepier the fuller my stomach gets). Anyway, those two books. Then I started thinking about our mortality, on an individual and cosmic scale, which is always fun to do on New Year's Eve. It's appropriate though, we suddenly feel the grasp of passing time around the new year, as if throughout the year time didn't really exist. It's usually only around this time of year that people start saying, "my, time flies so fast! It feels like yesterday when we were planning resolutions for the year."

It didn't really freak me out, just made me contemplative about a few things. I started thinking about how insignificant we are remembering the size of the ever expanding universe, and yet how significant we find the things we feel and experience to be. No one is going to remember my mum or dad or sister or friends in a hundred years. Not really anyway, no one will remember the weird quips they sometimes make in very specific situations, not the way they like to take their tea or coffee, not their favourite ice cream flavours, not the way they can make you feel like you're worth so much and absolutely nothing in different circumstances, not the very specific way they express love and encouragement and disdain and support and annoyance and appreciation and gratitude and disappointment and pride and anger and envy or even terrible sadness that they try so hard not to reveal to you. In 50 years, not that many people are going to remember that song you keep hearing over and over this summer and the overwhelming feeling it evoked in you every time it started playing on the radio. And who's even going to remember how to use a radio in 20 years? So basically it just made me think about all this subjective sense of significance and the temporariness of everything, and yet why does it feel like the world is so old? Why does life often feel like it's been going on for so long? Why does it feel like you've known someone forever when in reality you've only known them for 2 years and 8 months?

Now I'm just rambling...

What I want you to take from this blog post is that I thank you for 2013 but that I also apologise for 2013. Great things happened because of humanity, awful things happened because of humanity, and you and I are an active part of this process whether or not we like to admit it. But year after year we manage to prevail as a race of beings only to do more amazing and horrible things for the years to come. So here's to a 2014 filled with all kinds of shit, great and awful. Hopefully not so much awful shit, and if any awful shit are to happen at all, I hope (and I hope you do as well) we manage not to lose our empathy for one another.


[edited so I don't sound so much like the illiterate, sleep deprived fuck I am]