all about eve
Jeff already has written about what we did, with whom and where for New Year’s Eve. I’ll admit that with New Year’s Eve being his and my reunion after a week apart over Christmas, I was kind of hoping for a quiet evening alone together. However, I also wanted to support Jeff’s meet-up with his college friends, who were in town only through the next morning, making New Year’s Eve really his only opportunity to get together with them here in DC. And he and I did get to spend a wonderful lazy afternoon together, as I was able to get home at 2:30 when our office closed surprisingly early for the day.
Dinner was wonderful. I love Ethiopian food, but just don’t go out for it much; this was probably the first time in more than a year. Much of the rest of the evening, though, was smoky, crowded and loud, and the lines for the bar were so long that Jeff and I only got to drink one extremely overpriced (and only average in taste) appletini (cf. here and here), missing out on a champagne toast altogether. I also felt a little like I was intruding upon their get-together, a sort of fifth wheel.
The actual turning of the new year itself at midnight was also a little anticlimactic. One of our number having heard that there would be fireworks over the Mall (though neither Jeff nor I had heard or read anything of it locally), we left the bar at 11:45 in order to try to get to a good vantage point for the display. So at midnight the five of us were walking down a random DC street, and Jeff and I were able to give each other only the merest pecks to welcome in the new year together. Still, the sky was clear, the air was fresh and brisk and we were together, which was what I most wanted.
And, truth be told, I’m not really a big New Year’s Eve celebrator or New Year’s Day resolutionist anyway. In terms of my own soul-searching and intuitive sense of the cycles of the year, I tend to be in tune more with the old Celtic calendar, with its year turning occurring on Samhain at the end of October. Still, I did feel something significant and symbolic in ending one calendar year and beginning another hand-in-hand with Jeff, regardless of where we were or what we were doing at the time.