Ghost of New Year’s Eve Past

It’s the last day of 2008, so in the absence of anything better to write about, let’s go back in the annals of time and revisit New Year’s Eve Past, shall we?

There was the time, when I was a student and worked at a local restaurant, that I was asked – no, begged! – to work New Year’s Eve. Although my boyfriend and I had plans, the restaurant was closing at 9:30 pm, so I figured I could make a few extra dollars and still get to the downtown club before midnight. What I forgot was that I hadn’t quite finished sewing the slinky dress that I planned to wear, and had, in fact, been counting on that afternoon to do it. So there I was, during my break at work, frantically hemming the dress and trying to keep it clean. I got home shortly after 10 pm, my boyfriend was there waiting for me (furious, of course) – but I still wasn’t finished. I also had to press the dress and do my hair and makeup. We just barely made it to the club before midnight – and the relationship petered out not long after that, as I recall.

Then there was the time my (different) boyfriend and I were going on a New Year’s Eve party cruise in the harbour. First of all, by the time the queue snaked up to the buffet table, there was very little food left. Drinks were, naturally, way overpriced, and worse, so watered down that you were literally sipping water. The music was broadcast through speakers so horrible that you could rarely identify the song. The ship was scarily overcrowded, so it could only go out a ways into the harbour and anchor there – so of course, we were all captive. My friend Lynne muttered dramatically, over and over, “Someone is going to die here tonight.” In the end, no one did, but no one had a lot of fun, either.

There was a house party I attended once, where I had to go to the bathroom very badly, so I stormed in the unlocked door – and interrupted two women doing a line of cocaine. Naive little me, I’d never even seen cocaine before, and didn’t quite know how to react. I think I mumbled something incoherent and backed away slowly. I think I even forgot how badly I had to pee.

When I was married, we had been invited to another house party (totally different social circle, thank goodness!). The Ex was suffering from an extreme bout of depression, and I was at my wits’ end dealing with him. I so badly wanted to get out of the house and go to the party, but I worried about the wisdom of leaving him at home with our young daughter. I ended up calling the hosts of the party with some excuse as to why we wouldn’t be there, then I poured myself a stiff drink or three, cried my eyes out, and watched taped episodes of Seinfeld till 2 in the morning, all by myself. The Ex eventually apologized, but refused treatment for depression (Him: “I’m just moody, that’s all! Anybody can be in a bad mood sometimes!!” Me: “Not for two weeks and holed up in the spare bedroom, they can’t.”). I eventually left him. I think he’s still depressed.

But there have been some good New Year’s Eves too: hanging out with my brother, sister-in-law, and her son drinking and laughing and telling stories, canoodling in various places with Porsche Guy, watching a marathon of James Bond DVDs, and my all-time favourite, sitting in box seats watching the Toronto Maple Leafs play the Vancouver Canucks one year. I was wearing my brand-new original Canucks jersey (and getting quite a bit of male attention for it, too!), throwing back drink after drink procured at our private bar, running back and forth to our private bathroom after every drink (I pee a lot when there’s alcohol involved, okay?!), and not even caring that PG was going to rub it in all year about his beloved Leafs beating the hometown Canucks. Ah, that was a perfect moment!

And this year? PG and I are going, with two other couples, to see Trooper perform. Hopefully we’ll be home by midnight because I have high expectations for another perfect moment, punctuated with champagne.

Happy New Year, all!

Do you see what I see?

I wear contacts. Not earth-shattering news, I know, but important to me. I’ve been wearing them for four years, but I’ve worn glasses for many years before that, since I was eleven. My glasses were for distance, but when I hit the big 4 – 0, my close-up vision started to be a problem. It got to be quite a pain to whip the glasses on to watch TV, whip the glasses off to read the TV Guide, for example. I tried bifocal contacts, but I found that I couldn’t see print as clearly as I needed to, so my ophthalmologist got me into mono-vision. This means that I have one contact for distance vision, the other for close-up. It works very well for me.

I recently had a checkup with said ophthalmologist. My prescription hasn’t changed for the four years I’ve had contacts, so I was pretty much in and out of the office, armed with another year’s supply of contacts.

I opened the new packages about ten days ago. And somehow, my distance vision wasn’t quite as clear with these new lenses as I was used to. At first, I attributed it to being crazy, then being tired, then old contacts that needed to be changed more frequently (like every day, but I’m cheap, so I wear them for two days usually), then I just thought I got an inferior package of contacts. After all, my prescription was exactly the same, so I should have been seeing exactly the same, too.

Today, Porsche Guy and I were sitting around, drinking Bailey’s and coffee, discussing the GPS he bought me for Christmas. My left contact was bothering me, so after poking at it for a while, I decided I’d better take it right out, inspect it and clean it, the reposition it in my eye if all seemed well. Of course, watching me remove it creeped PG right out (it didn’t occur to me to slip discreetly into the bathroom to do this), then it ripped as I attempted to remove it, then once I got both pieces, I dropped them somewhere in the living room.

Then I headed upstairs to my bathroom to get a new contact, muttering that this was going to throw off my system, since now I’d have one contact less from the left eye box than the right eye box (if that even makes sense!). I reached into the cupboard, grabbed the top two boxes in the stack, as I couldn’t be bothered to actually look carefully and only take out the left eye box. Naturally the top box was the right eye box, so I moved on the the other one – on which I noticed, for the first time, a small round red R sticker. Right eye?? I looked carefully at the other box I’d taken out. Another small round red R sticker. Huh??

Apparently, for the past ten days, I have been wearing a right contact in my left eye.

This explains a number of things, but not why it took me so long to figure it out.

A brief word from DD

Darling Daughter has an associate degree in Creative Writing. She writes copious amounts. Naturally, she has had her own blog for many years, but it’s one of those where readers have to be invited in by her in order to access her writing. Apparently, I am the topic of some of her posts. She seems to find me amusing. I think I’m a very competent maternal figure. I hear her snickering as I type this.

Anyway, the following is one her latest on-line offerings. I had actually planned on weaving the incident she describes into some quirky little composition of my own, but I like what she wrote: short, punchy, funny. And she beat me to it.

In the grocery store. My mother is staring at a display of Coke bottle packages, wearing a flustered expression. The conversation she’d been attempting to have with me trails to a halt.

ME: Mom?
MY MOTHER: *hands flailing in the air* I’m seeing what I want to buy but I don’t want it to look like that!
Beat.
BOTH: *dissolve into laughter*
MY MOTHER: Cans! I want it in cans, not bottles!

And then I took her home, because clearly that was enough socializing for her for one day.

Merry Christmas 2008

Here’s wishing you and yours a very Merry Christmas! Hope you are surrounded by family, friends, and love!

Let them eat cake

Yes, I am an almost-Christmas baby.

When I was a kid, it really bugged me to have my birthday so close to Christmas. I used to want to change it to September (probably because that’s when my brother’s birthday is).

But now, I see the advantages. For one thing, I only have to make one wish list per year. For another, my holiday season lasts a lot longer than most people’s. For yet another, it makes me somewhat unique and my friends do tend to remember my birthday simply because it’s at a time of year people recall quite easily anyway (though I’d like to believe that none of my friends would ever forget my birthday regardless!).

So I have actually been celebrating since Saturday evening, when Porsche Guy took me out for my birthday dinner – and it was at a restaurant far swankier than Tim Horton’s, too! He also gave me my presents then, because one of them was the cable that would enable my iPod to work with the stereo controls of my car, so he thought I might like to try it out on the way to and from the restaurant. Then we went to a hockey game Monday night, and the Canucks won, so that was a bit of a gift. Tuesday was the actual day, so there were a few more gifts from DD, my mom, and my friend Meshka, who also took me out for a vanilla latté. I had several phone messages and emails from various other pals, so I feel quite loved and appreciated! Then, DD took me out for dinner at one of our local golf courses, and my mom has promised to take me out for another dinner if the snow ever melts enough for her to get out of her driveway.

But it has just occurred to me: there has been a very important omission. Birthday cake. I did not have a birthday cake. And birthday cake as a concept is just as important at fifty-one as it is at five.

Now what will I eat for breakfast tomorrow?