Happy ___ ____!

It's a new year. Again. 2012. I'm still waiting to see if the world crashes to an end. Maybe it did and I just slept through it.

I have lost the ability to enjoy New Years Eve. In fact, I'm pretty sure the last time I had much fun on NYE was in 2000- and there are pictures floating around someplace that substantiate just how much fun I had. I can party. Sort of.

I COULD party. I can't party anymore. Not because of the kids. I'm not so lame that I'll blame my kids for how lame I am. I can't party anymore because I'm not allowed. I don't have the requisite number of friends.

I don't know what happened. When I was 18, I had more friends than I had barrettes (and at that time, I had a really impressive barrette collection). When I turned 21, I still had lots of friends, but I had learned to become slightly more 'selective' about whom I spent my time with. By 25, I had a couple handfuls of friends.

Now, I have three-ish. My oldest friends live 2000 kms away, so I don't count them in my three-ish.

The problem, as I see it, since I'm not super cool anymore, I don't get to have/ go to big parties, which, as everyone under the age of 20 can tell you- THAT is where you meet your newest besties. Well, parties and bars.

I'm just not awesome enough to: spend three or four nights a week barhopping; to meet everyone (well, everyone worth knowing); spend hundreds of dollars on liquor and beer; use facebook to find the people I met at the club and spend the next two hours tagging myself in all the pictures from the night before.

It's probably why I haven't managed to crack 1000 friends yet on facebook. Because I'm too lame.

I don't go drinking. I don't have parties. I don't text (actually, I haven't seen my cell in over a month now- and if I do find it, I'm not sure where I put the charger). I don't spend hours everyday trying to find the most flattering picture of myself, so I can make it my newest profile picture (in fact, I once used a picture of me making "monkey face" as a profile picture, and it's about the most unattractive picture I've ever seen).

Those are some of the reasons I can't have NYE anymore.

The biggest reason though? I got a letter from the "cool" kids about five years back, uninviting me to "New Years Eve" for the rest of my life. I'm not even allowed to SAY, "Happy New Year".

It's federally mandated that I have to be in bed before the ball drops. Fact.

So, instead of HNY, I say, "May you have the longest year of your life. May you have all the things you never knew you wanted. May the people who love you continue to do so."