happy new year
here's hoping that 2005 brings you happiness and challenge, safety and risk, health and adventure, harmony and good times. kampai!
my prior three new year's eves:
31 dec 2001
lounging at a plastic table outside a concrete, palm-thatch-roofed shack, i clinked bottles of angkor beer with mates in a quiet cambodian beach town. a month later, was back in saigon to spend tet (vietnamese new year) swapping lucky money in red envelopes, taking polite bites of banh chung and then inching down noisy, joyful, motorbike-choked streets to a pagoda where, bowing to a likeness of the buddha, i wished happiness to all my faraway loved ones and got all teary-eyed (like i NEVER do; it was probably all that incense smoke). then in april, celebrated yet again in chiang mai, when songkran (thai new year) rolled around – as did truckbeds full of young guys shooting super-powered water rifles loaded with ice water. more like a blessing were the gentle thai men who took handfuls of jasmine-laced water from silver bowls and smilingly sprinkled them on my head.
31 dec 2002
met a long-unseen friend in kuala lumpur for the seredipitous coincidence of his jumping-off-tall-buildings competition and my first assignment as a spy. after watching several days' worth of sensorily-understimulated people taking running leaps off the 73rd floor of the petronas towers, freefalling story after story, and then yanking parachutes open and landing mere yards in front of me, the new year's eve ten-way jump at midnight did not seem as crazy as i'd initially thought it would be. with my feet in the reflecting pool, fireworks and brightly-colored canopies opening above like flowers, surrounded by a quarter of a million cheering malaysians, had one of those huh, guess i'll never see THAT again moments.
31 dec 2003
popped a bottle of minibar champagne, drank it, and thus fortified, picked my way into the frigid streets of stockholm among aloof strangers to watch fireworks go off above icy canal and dignified old town while pondering the beautiful irony of traveling alone as someone who prefers to travel solo yet has been invited to spend this particular evening with someone who manages to arrive, oh, maybe a day later. that particular someone spent midnight on new year's eve hurtling 565 miles per hour through the air, getting poured free champagne by his extremely attentive flight attendant. also acquiring her phone number. all of which makes it my special right to give him crap about it for the rest of his life, which right i gleefully exercise.
this year, dos equis caught the train on time and met me in LA on the 31st. we spent the evening hanging out with dear filmschoolgirl and her brilliant hubby, playing a movie trivia DVD game with a bunch of filmmakers. dos equis and i came in at respectable second place before the game was abandoned for unstructured champagne drinking, watching the ball drop uncommentaried by dick clark, and merciless teasing of the hostess. because that is what true friends and siblings are for.
how did you celebrate this new year?
my prior three new year's eves:
31 dec 2001
lounging at a plastic table outside a concrete, palm-thatch-roofed shack, i clinked bottles of angkor beer with mates in a quiet cambodian beach town. a month later, was back in saigon to spend tet (vietnamese new year) swapping lucky money in red envelopes, taking polite bites of banh chung and then inching down noisy, joyful, motorbike-choked streets to a pagoda where, bowing to a likeness of the buddha, i wished happiness to all my faraway loved ones and got all teary-eyed (like i NEVER do; it was probably all that incense smoke). then in april, celebrated yet again in chiang mai, when songkran (thai new year) rolled around – as did truckbeds full of young guys shooting super-powered water rifles loaded with ice water. more like a blessing were the gentle thai men who took handfuls of jasmine-laced water from silver bowls and smilingly sprinkled them on my head.
31 dec 2002
met a long-unseen friend in kuala lumpur for the seredipitous coincidence of his jumping-off-tall-buildings competition and my first assignment as a spy. after watching several days' worth of sensorily-understimulated people taking running leaps off the 73rd floor of the petronas towers, freefalling story after story, and then yanking parachutes open and landing mere yards in front of me, the new year's eve ten-way jump at midnight did not seem as crazy as i'd initially thought it would be. with my feet in the reflecting pool, fireworks and brightly-colored canopies opening above like flowers, surrounded by a quarter of a million cheering malaysians, had one of those huh, guess i'll never see THAT again moments.
31 dec 2003
popped a bottle of minibar champagne, drank it, and thus fortified, picked my way into the frigid streets of stockholm among aloof strangers to watch fireworks go off above icy canal and dignified old town while pondering the beautiful irony of traveling alone as someone who prefers to travel solo yet has been invited to spend this particular evening with someone who manages to arrive, oh, maybe a day later. that particular someone spent midnight on new year's eve hurtling 565 miles per hour through the air, getting poured free champagne by his extremely attentive flight attendant. also acquiring her phone number. all of which makes it my special right to give him crap about it for the rest of his life, which right i gleefully exercise.
this year, dos equis caught the train on time and met me in LA on the 31st. we spent the evening hanging out with dear filmschoolgirl and her brilliant hubby, playing a movie trivia DVD game with a bunch of filmmakers. dos equis and i came in at respectable second place before the game was abandoned for unstructured champagne drinking, watching the ball drop uncommentaried by dick clark, and merciless teasing of the hostess. because that is what true friends and siblings are for.
how did you celebrate this new year?
posted by a wandering eye at 3:55 PM
1 Comments:
a quiet joyful conversation over supper with friends until 7:00 pm...
mindful reflection and meditation on the moment until 10:00 pm...
then to bed until 6:00 am when I arose, dressed, stepped out for a walk, and discovered that I had the entire mountain and the morning all to myself...
except for that solitude -- and the wicked sense that I was the only soul on the face of the planet who was enjoying it -- early on new years day, it was not remarkably different than any other earthly spin that I can recall...
i liked 'songkran', as well, but that was many years ago in chiang san, watching river boats and lao smugglers on the far shore of the mekong...
and then i joined in quiet joyful conversation over supper with friends until 7:00 pm...
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