On the morning of January 1, 2004, I looked like I had a really good time on New Year's Eve. Hair was sticking out in all directions. Vestiges of makeup were smeared. Dark circles under the eyes.

One might be tempted to think I was hung over, had they seen me walk into the Cheesecake Factory for lunch on January 1. The stiffness in my gait might lead one to believe that I'd been up to no good the night before.

New Year's Eve is the most overrated of holidays. I've never had a good one. Except for that one time I was in England and learned what snogging is. That wasn' t terrible. In general, though, it's all about high expectations with very little payoff. I am old enough now not to feel ashamed about watching Dick Clark yet another year. I have come to terms with the possibility that there may be people out there who have a good time on New Year's Eve. There may be people who are beautiful and cool and hip and know where the fun actually happens. I'm not one of them, though, and it's okay.

My New Year's Eve was a road trip that began at 1:30 in the morning at my parents' house in North Carolina and ended around 5:00 in Boston. The Suz was along, but she slept most of the way, leaving me alone to discover the joys of sattelite radio in the rental car. I am in love with the XM, mainly because they have a channel that is all 80's pop. I didn't even know how badly I wanted to hear "Der Kommissar" until it came on somewhere in the dark Virgina morning. Even better, the channel called Fred was counting down 2000 alternative essential songs, so they were playing The Clash and The Smiths and The Cure and The Violent Femmes, allowing me to relive my adolescent, post-hair band, angst. I joined the countdown somewhere around song 250 and I heard it all the way up the the end. "Just Like Heaven," possibly one of the most perfect alternative pop songs ever recorded, only made it to #3. Fred and I may need to have a talk about that. But in Fred's defense, when's the last time you heard a radio station play Oingo Boingo's "Dead Man's Party?"

But 15 hours in the car is 15 hours in the car, and it leaves you looking rough the next day.
I drank a LOT of Mountain Dew. Somewhere around Maryland, I stopped making sense.
When I got bored, I'd flip to CNN and announce to The Suz that "This is CNN," or flip to CNN Espanol and turn up the volume really loud. For some reason I found this really, hysterically funny.
In northern Pennsylvania, my ass went numb.* So the funny walk on New Year's Morning can be attributed to the pins and needles sensation one gets when feeling returns to a sleeping body part.

I'd been invited to a party on New Year's Eve. This might have been The Year New Year's Wouldn't Suck.
Alas it was not to be. And so it ended like this:

By the time we got home, I wasn't even using actual words anymore.
The Suz discovered that her boy, "Joe" was off in New Hampshire.
But USA was running a marathon of Law and Order SVU.

I woke up just long enough to watch Dick Clark drop the ball in Times Square.

Two days later, I still look just a little bit like hell. But I'm getting better.

*When travelling to Western NC from New England, 84 from CT to 81 outside of Scranton, PA is the best way I've been able to determine. While I concede to the "I know a better way" crowd that 95 might be a better route to Eastern NC and points South, I've done both routes enough times to know what yields fewer hours of my highway lunacy. I also consulted the Rand McNally 2004 Road Atlas, which I bought instead of the Betty Crocker Cookbook on a recent trip to my local wholesale warehouse, and determined that the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and Tunnel is miles out of the way from anywhere I generally want to go. I now consider this argument closed.