Spending My NYE w/a Couple of Real Party Animals - An Electric Reindeer & A Tortoiseshell Cat

Just as there are team sports and invididual sports, there are group holidays (The 4th of July comes to mind!) and there are couples’ holidays. New Year’s Eve is a couples’ holiday.

With very few exceptions, being a single person at a New Year’s Eve party is like being back in the seventh grade. You are in possession of a piece of paper stating that your presence was requested. You don’t have on the splashiest outfit, but you are in dress code and you don’t look too out of place. You mill about the halls making small talk. You know where in the building to go when you’re hungry, but you’re not sure who you should sit with when you get there. You watch the clock a lot, eager to get home and even if you do find a kindred soul or two to hang out with, you never really feel comfortable.

When the clock strikes midnight, you suddenly feel like you’re the girl in the braces and the clearance rack clothing waiting awkwardly for two impossibly cool ninth graders, locked in a passionate embrace right in front of your locker, to unmesh so you can get your books and go to class.

Deciding what to do for New Year’s Eve this year, took some careful consideration. Because 2009 was such a challenging one for me, I wanted to celebrate its passing. I also wanted to properly recognize the arrival, not only of 2010, but of a whole new, hopefully fabulous, decade. This meant that going to bed before midnight (something I haven’t done on New Year’s Eve since I was in Elementary School) or puckering up and planting a kiss on Brandy, the Wonder Dog’s, head at exactly 12:00 just wouldn’t do. My criteria for the evening were simple:

a) Be at an event primarily populated with people I know and love. A few nice, attractive, successful, single male strangers, preferably friends of friends, thrown into the mix, would certainly be OK too. For that matter, I’d be happy to see a single gal or two. (Friendly, normal single gals, please...I think I'll pass on the drop dead gorgeous and/or conniving variety). Having other single gals in attendance would mean that if any of my friends decided to go play spin the bottle in the hall closet or anything - or whatever the adult New Year’s Eve Party version of that might be - I’d have someone to talk to and/or to commiserate with.

b) Be at a shindig where there would be an abundance of food worthy of the pre-diet reckless abandon I had sanctioned for myself for the evening.

c) Have access to a bottle or two of a bubbly adult beverage.

d) Be in close enough vicinity of a television to see the ball drop in Times Square.

e) Be somewhere other than my own home, preferably in a lovely locale devoid of any visible reminders of 2009’s woes.

f) Do something that didn’t involve a large (or small, for that matter) expenditure of funds.

g) Have fun, but have fun in a manner that would not land me in a jail cell or result in hand wringing or gnashing of teeth the following morning, and

h) Be somewhere where the likelihood of my finding myself staring at back of people’s heads while they sighed and swooned and smooched at the stroke of midnight would be minimal.

Simple enough right? Wrong!

I reviewed my options:

Spend the evening with part of my family. I might have gone with this one if not for the eleventh hour Sugar Bowl tickets, my sister and her brood acquired. They ended up driving to New Orleans instead of to Orlando, as planned, so they could watch Tim Tebow go out in style. (Yay Florida Gators!) Anyway, their last minute change in plans took this option off the table.

Spend the evening playing board games with friend T and her family. This was clearly a pity offer. While it was sweet, I chose to pass. After all, a spirited family New Year’s Eve Jenga Tournament just isn’t the same if the people carefully extracting the wooden blocks are members of someone else’s family.

Join Friend C and her beau for a Longwood New Year’s Eve version of a pub crawl. (The neighbors were all calling this event a progressive dinner, but I doubt anyone was fooled by the misnomer.)

I didn’t know the names of all of the party guests, but I knew the name of one – Jack Daniels. I knew this “progressive dinner” would involve sloshing drinks, badly behaved neighborhood canines, inappropriate jokes and too many men named Bob and I wanted no part of it. *Neither did Friend C, which is why she REALLY invited me. While she loves her sweetie pie, she wanted to have a friend with her while she and her man ran the street-long Swedish meatball to Sugar Cookie gauntlet.

*This same friend once tried to talk me into marrying her short, balding, bespeckled, pasty white, never married, socially backwards brother in law. Though this gentleman is a kind, financially stable sort, who undoubtedly would’ve remained faithful to me, her attempts to set us up had nothing to do with her concern for my well being. She just wanted an ally at the big family Thanksgiving dysfunction fests.

Had I married Friend C’s brother in law back when she was pitching that idea, I would now be on my own at those holiday dinners, as she managed to extricate herself from all of the craziness about five years ago. This New Year’s Eve afternoon, while she was busy slicing vegetables for her “Progressive Dinner” tossed salad, I would’ve likely found myself, needle and thread in hand, putting the finishing touches on a canvas bonnet and apron, so as to have it ready in time for the annual primitive camping event her former husband’s extended family participates in every January in a field up near Ocala. Trust me, I would’ve been cursing her for getting me involved in that nonsense and I don’t even curse. Bottom line: Friend C can be very persuasive and I love her to pieces, but I know when to tell her no!

Buy a trampy looking outfit with money I don’t have and go downtown with Acquaintance S, a neighbor. Commiserate with Acquaintance S about the sad state of the prior year. Drown sorrows with alcohol. Troll for drunk, single men. Hook up with drunk, single men, then try to get home safely by attempting to outguess law enforcement officers and avoid roadblocks. This is just not how I roll! (Not only that, this, too, was a pity offer! :)

Ride over to friend J’s New Smyrna beach house with friend P and her husband. Welcome in the new year while enjoying cocktails and tasty munchies and listening to the sound of the surf. On the surface this was a very appealing offer. Criteria A – G as outlined above: check, check, check, check, check, check and check. The only problem with this plan was with criterion H. There might have been another single person in attendance at this party, but based on the guest list, I didn’t think the chances were good. While these friends are wonderful and while I LOVE being at the beach on New Year’s Eve, this just didn’t seem like a good thing to do to myself this year.

So…. What did I end up doing? I ended up inviting myself over to my friend L’s place. L, who is also in transition (i.e. dealing with family drama, in a lease and contemplating a move, not thrilled with her career situation, spending her first holiday season without an ex who needed to go – but who still takes up more real estate in her brain than he should) considered her various offers and decided it would be better to just stay home and watch TV. When I heard this was what she was up to, I asked her if she would mind company. I was so delighted when she said she wouldn’t.

We had a lovely dinner of shrimp cocktail, salmon, baked potato, berry pie and vanilla ice cream and we washed it down with bottle of Electric Reindeer Merlot she had received as a workplace Christmas gift. We were just about to pop a cute and uplifting, but not overly romantic, thank you very much, DVD into the player when it became obvious that L’s adorable cat Samantha (Sam for short) was not feeling very festive.

We Googled her symptoms. There was an 80% chance they were signs of something minor and treatable and there was a 20% chance Sam was in serious danger, which could only be reversed if she was rushed to an emergency veterinarian’s office post haste.

We eyed the clock. We eyed the toddler sized bottle of wine which sat on L’s table ready to help us celebrate if the Electric Reindeer gave out on us.

We eyed the TV and we watched the cat. By twenty ‘til twelve, Sam’s health concerns showed no signs of correcting themselves and L became increasingly more worried. (Who can blame her? I’m sure I would’ve felt exactly the same way if it had been Brandy the Wonder Dog whose life was hanging in the balance.) L apologized for the turn the evening had taken and she suggested that I stay back and watch the ball drop while she ventured to the vet’s office alone. Of course I wasn’t going to let her do that. I have my shortcomings as a friend, but I would never consider letting anyone I care about go out into the night all by herself, dodging intoxicated holiday revelers and worrying herself sick about her beloved pet.

We arrived at the Veterinary Emergency Clinic of Central Florida in Casselberry at approximately 11:59 on the last day of the year from hell…three scarred and damaged gals (one with fur, two without). When you think about it, it really was such a fitting way to end such a less than stellar year.

Anyway, this is where the story takes an upturn. The vet checked Sam out and diagnosed her with something, which was causing her discomfort, but which was not threatening her life. The vet’s assistant put a syringe of something unpleasant tasting in Sam’s mouth. She gave L more of the unpleasant tasting substance to take home and instructions for getting it into Sam’s system. The receptionist gave L a bill – that part of the story was definitely not an upturn – and she sent us on our way.

So there you have it. 2009 is over. I survived it. L survived it and Sam survived it. It wasn’t a particularly good one, but, as Sam reminded us, it could’ve been worse. We all three still have to deal with the unpleasant side effects of some of the rotten things that occurred towards the end of the last decade. We have to be proactive. We have to keep taking our medicine. We have to continue to be able to laugh at life’s little crazy episodes and we have to keep moving forward. Before you know it, we’ll all be good as new.

Hope whatever unpleasantness made its way into your 2009 is either gone or about to be! Happy 2010! XXOO