YAY!!! 2008 is here at last!!! Hurrah!!! (btw, the title of this post is dripping with sarcasm (incase you couldn't tell already))

Another Gregorian calendar year has passed us by and the Earth is in the same spot in space it was 365 years ago and is already moving on to complete the same cycle it has made roughly 4.54 billion times already (thank you wikipedia). The question I ask of course is why is this particular day so important over most others? Perhaps I'm being too much of a cynic as I could ask the same question of any holiday we celebrate each year, such as Christmas, or Easter, (which appears to land on a different date each year for some odd reason) or perhaps even my own birthday?

Okay, I am actually going to stop with that particular line of thought now. I haven't the time or the mental capacity to form a decent argument for how pointless it is to celebrate the ushering in of a new calendar year. Everyone has the right to celebrate what ever they want.

Would you like to know the real reason I'm starting this rant? There's a couple of reasons actually. The first reason I'm pissed off with New Year celebrations is because I didn't go out last night. I stayed in had a few drinks and went to bed at around 2am. Now personally, I didn't mind staying in, it was for the most part a personal choice. What gets me is the way other people are about it "oh, you gotta go out on New Years!" "Yeah, who wants to stay in on New Years" "Come out have a few drinks, it's a celebration"

Oh yeah?!!! Celebrating what exactly? There is nothing actually special about this day except the fact it gives us an excuse to have a celebration and we have celebrations all the time even when we don't have an excuse for a celebration and we just want to get pissed up! And I'm not against any of that, I just don't want to be hounded for choosing to miss this particular celebration out. There will be others and I will go if I can be bothered.

Another reason for this little moan is that this is also the particular time of the year when people decide to make some sort of change in their life, or start a new hobby etc. I am of course talking about the New Year's resolution. We make promises to ourselves that we all like to think we can keep but of course we usually end up breaking that promise and going back to our old ways until the next year comes around where try it all over again.

The reason this gets me down is not nessecarily a hatred of this particular tradition, it's more that it brings into focus my own personal failures for this past year. Coz I don't wait until New Years to make a new resoloution to myself. I make them practically every day and continously fail to stick to them. And even as I'm writing this right now I am thinking that it will be different this time. All the things I need to get done and want to get done I am gonna do and I'm gonna stick to it too. This blog for example, I started it yesterday with the promise to myself that I will write in it everyday as a way of keeping me writing regularly (and perhaps improve my terrible grammar and sentence construction). So even if I do no other writing on that day I can still say "well at least I wrote in my blog" (providing that this doesn't become the only writing I am doing).

So, here's to a new year, a plethora of new resolutions, and no more broken promises.