The New New Thing
10 Million Bon Jovi Fans Can't Be Wrong - Disc Three
Fairy Tarots
A good pedicure. Or, anything from my wish list.
Here's how it went down... Post Date: 1/1/05
Original Journal Date: 1/1/05 Christmas
I don't know. I thought I was going to write some big long entry about how awesome my holiday was, but then I sat down to write it and I realized that I didn't think it was the type of story that warranted story telling, it was more like the kind of event that one just experiences. I mean, I guess I can give you bullet points.
The plane ride in was uneventful. That's the most you can hope for on a holiday week flight, right? At times, my boyfriend can look like the unibomber. Coleman's Fish Market. That good. Best exchange of the weekend, of which there were many ? my dad proceeds to drive us crazy by reciting the entire Gettysburg address. My brother looks dead at him and say, "Great. Now, what day is it?" See, this is only funny if you find cruel Alzheimer's humor funny. Almost my entire family was there. That doesn't happen all that much. It's so amazing when we're all together. It's just hours and hours and hours of high balls and increasing ball busting on EVERYBODY. Nobody is safe. People bring their boyfriends and girlfriends, and it's always amazing that they don't go running in the opposite direction. I love my family. I spent part of Christmas night at the boyfriend's mother's birthday with the cutest baby ever, one of the four or five cutest stuffed animals ever and really, really good bean dip. Thanks for the gifts, yo. That means you. I mean, I got really awesome shit this year. For real. Sloppy hippie shit. For real. Ferris has a house. Blows my mind. Awesome house. Armageddon is coming. That's not really an upper. But the tsunamis are just the beginning. Mark my word. It can't last forever, this way we live. Maybe that's a longer entry later. Bath product gift count: 42 pieces.I'm sleepy. He's sick. The cats are scrappy. More later. New Years This is more of a story. So, at 2pm on New Year's Eve day, we still had no idea what the two, four, or possibly six of us were going to do for New Year's Eve. We'd known there would be either four or six of us for New Year's Eve for a while, but nobody had made it a priority to plan. So, we take an hour and call all over town to make plans. This is done while calling back and forth to the two or possibly four other people who would be joining us. Dinner? Not so many places with open seats left on New Year's Eve. I get frustrated because in my book this stuff should have been done long ago. Finally, I give up and let the Cute Boy take control of things. And he, I must say, does an excellent job of both getting a dinner reservation and figuring out what we will be doing after the dinner. I have to give him mad props for getting it all under control. Then scutter about whether there would be three of us, four of us, or six of us, but eventually it all works itself out. I confess that I had reservations about spending New Year's Eve on the Strip. I mean, I hate big crowds where thousands upon thousands of people are drunk and stupid. My idea of a good New Year's Eve involves sitting in the Halffington's living room with a good bottle of champagne and some tapas and a dvd. But I've never spent New Year's on the Strip, so I'm kind of excited. For the record, in my early twenties I partied a lot on New Year's Eve. Clubs, NYC, big crowd events. I think you have a better tolerance for these things in your early and mid-twenties. Eventually though, you start to enjoy quiet and fine champagne and shrimp cocktail and all that stuff more. Age? Maybe. Experience? Maybe. Refinement? I'll argue that. The first part of the night is dinner. Check that. The first part of the night is driving to dinner. You know, honestly, it could have been worse. They closed the Strip down at 5pm, but there were enough roads open that we were able to maneuver around and get a spot in the MGM parking garage and get to Pietro's even before we were supposed to meet the New Year's crew there. Dinner? Lovely. Five courses and an intermezzo. A nice martini. The Cute Boy looking, well, cute. A perfect way to start out New Year's Eve. And then we hit the strip. There are 330,000 people on the Strip. It's now the largest New Year's celebration in the U.S.A.. Bigger than Times Square, which makes sense because Times Square is smaller in space availability. But anyway, we start walking along. People are crazy. There's breast flashing (not mine, look how I've grown up) and lesbian kissing and general frat boy behavior chanting about both of these things. It's a little nippy, but not too cold. People are wired. We decide to head to Bally's to get a drink in the room before the countdown and fireworks. And therein, perhaps a mistake. The closer we get to the whole popular hub at the Bellagio and Paris, the more crowded it gets. We believe people, including me, were under the impression that the Bellagio would put on some awesome water show at midnight. So it gets incredibly crowded. Painfully crowded, and the ghetto behavior is in full effect. By ghetto behavior, I mean meaningless hollering, pushing, commenting on women's asses and beer drinking. Despite that and the massive crowd, when we realize we can't make it all the way to Bally's, we find a lovely spot to countdown and watch fireworks form next to Paris. Next to us are a group of guys who have brought their bongo drums with them and made a little drum circle to keep the people happy and fired up. I like them. Those are people after my own heart. We snuggle up in the increasingly stinging cold. So, firstly. Yes. The count down. It should happen at midnight, or more accurately ten seconds before midnight. However, seemingly, both Paris and Bally's and the Bellagio have miscalibrated their clocks, so the countdown happens at ten till midnight. As in ten minutes before the new year. People half-assedly countdown with it, but we're all confused because, well, you know, it's not midnight. But we're all confident that the clocks will be reset and there will be a new countdown at the proper time. At midnight. Guess what? No countdown. That's right. Casinos with millions and millions of dollars in technology budget were unable to correctly set a clock and display screen to properly display a countdown for New Year's at the proper time. So I braved the cold and 330,000 drunk, obnoxious people, and I didn't even get a freakin' New Year's Eve countdown. I mean, what the hell is that? What's New Year's without a countdown? About ten minutes later, fireworks start going off, which is what lets everybody know that it's actually New Year's. Yep. That's how we figured it out. Because the fireworks started. 330,000 people. Some of the most technologically advanced media screens in the world. No New Year's Eve countdown. The fireworks, admittedly, were quite, quite nice. Bellagio, however, did not do a water show. But it felt really lovely to stand there in the cold and watch the fireworks with the Cute Boy. It took us 45 minutes to fight through the crowds back to the parking garage. It took us, wait for it, over an hour to get out of the parking garage. I'm not joking, but you know what? It was worth it for the moment during the fireworks. So yeah, it was a nice New Year's. It ended nicely. Really, really, nicely. And now I'm sitting around watching Miracle because I didn't get to do it on Christmas Day. And I have things to say about the upcoming year. But for now, yeah, those were my holidays. I hope yours were just as good.