Once again, the overrated kerfuffle of New Year’s has descended upon us. Bloated with Christmas cookies and eggnog, crushed beneath the accumulated debt of profligate holiday spending, and driven to the edge of madness by prolonged contact with our relatives, we prepare to bid the old year farewell in a flurry of confetti and cheap champagne that represents the wildest party of the year for many of us. We could spend the evening in quiet reflection of the year just past, perhaps hoisting a pint or two, perhaps thinking about things we would have done differently if we could have. But no – instead, we polish off a couple of bottles of Korbel and spend the first hours of the new year hurling, while just outside the door a horsey-faced girl shrieks, “Gloria Gaynor! I love that song!” and ashes on our new coat.

Now, I have never needed an excuse to go out and get hammered, but I think we need to re-examine some of our New Year’s traditions. Take “Auld Lang Syne,” for example. Who nominated this song for official New Year’s tune – Helen Keller? Nobody knows the words, nobody knows what “auld lang syne” means, and I defy you to come up with a more grating melody. May I suggest as a replacement the little-known punk gem “I’m OK, You Suck” by the Queers?

I would also like to suggest a moratorium on “year in review” issues by magazines. Never mind the overexposure of certain stories that should have long ago collapsed on themselves – Heaven’s Gate, Marv Albert, the exact dimensions of our Chief Executive’s penis, Pamela and Tommy’s home video, space station Mir’s uncanny imitation of a Ford Pinto, the English nanny, and a certain princess who shall remain nameless, to name just a few. I get sick of reading the same story over and over at different spin velocities, but I also sort of resent the implication that I can’t decide for myself what headlines qualified as important. As the end of the millennium approaches, we can look forward to countless Klip N’ Save guides to the past thousand years.

We can also look forward to an exponential escalation of the already excessive revelry that attends the average New Year’s Eve. I had a New Year’s Eve party at my apartment last year. Someone had spilled a drink involving cranberry juice on my carpet by ten o’clock. When we went up to the roof at midnight, not only had every other person in my building had the same idea, but the gale-force winds almost blew the entire gathering into the East River – not that that stopped my boyfriend from staying up there for an hour to “get some air” because the bottle of Southern Comfort he had killed on the train had suddenly stopped agreeing with him. After I poured him into a cab at one in the morning, a guy who had gone out for more beer at eleven-thirty finally reappeared, and then the Mack Mama turned up at one-thirty and reported that my doorman said that the apartment above mine had already lodged about ten complaints about the noise. I finally went to sleep at about five in the morning, and when I got up at ten to use the toilet, I found the cat sitting next to his litterbox and looking into it quizzically. Apparently, some of my guests had mistaken it for an ashtray, and as if I didn’t feel sick enough, I then had to get down on my hands and knees and pick about twenty cigarette butts out of the cat box. Now, keep in mind, I actually knew these people, so I probably don’t need to say that not for all the gold in Fort Knox would I show my face in Times Square on December 31st, 1999. If I want to hang out with pickpockets, Jesus freaks, and frat boys that pee on anything standing still for more than ten seconds, I’ll attend my next college reunion.

I can’t wait to see what resolutions people will make on the eve of the millennium. I have the usual list planned for 1998 – smoke less, eat less, shoot my mouth off less – and a lot of other people will make (and promptly break) the same resolutions for themselves. But what will our lists look like in two years? “This year, I vow to go to the gym more often, cut down on sweets, and OPEN THE SEVENTH SEAL TO DESTROY THE WHORE OF BABYLON AND USHER IN THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN.” Then again, perhaps not. But New Year’s resolutions seldom work, primarily because we make them arbitrarily instead of deciding rationally that we should give up certain detrimental habits and behaviors. My parents quit smoking on New Year’s Day at least three or four times, but it took the discovery of potentially cancerous tissue in my mother’s mouth to stop them for good. (Please join me in congratulating my parents for five smoke-free years.) I don’t advocate waiting for your health-care provider to scare the hell out of you before you decide to make some adjustments in your lifestyle, but I don’t see the sense of picking one day out of the year and setting unrealistic goals for yourself.

I guess I just don’t understand why we make such a fuss over New Year’s. Maybe taking stock of the year in its entirety makes us nervous on some unconscious level; maybe looking ahead makes us feel apprehensive. But when I was a little girl, I used to love New Year’s Eve. Each year on that day, I got to accompany my father to work. At six in the morning, Dad would tumble me out of bed and I would put on a nice little outfit and we would eat our cereal and get in the car and drive to the train station. Then we would wait for the train, and I felt very small standing on the platform among all the grey flannel legs of the men in our town going to work. On the train, I read a book and Dad read the paper, and then we crowded onto the PATH and I held Dad’s hand and tried not to think about what would happen if I got lost, because all the men had suits and camel coats on exactly like my father’s and I would never find him if forced to rely on wardrobe. Then we took a taxi to First Boston and rode the elevator up to Dad’s floor, and Dad would introduce me to all of his friends and colleagues as if I had invented indoor plumbing. Then Dad would do a little work and I would stare at and illegally touch the stuff on his desk – the blinking lights and computer monitors, and the phones, and the piles of paper that Dad always brought home for me to color on. Some computer whiz in the department usually set up a game on his monitor, and I would play that for a while, and then I got to have lunch in the cafeteria with Dad, which I found deliriously exciting because I always brought my lunch at school, and then we would make the mid-afternoon call to Mom on Dad’s phone, which smelled like Dad – cigarette smoke and Brut – and then later we would leave for home and I would fall asleep on the train. That night, I would tell all about our day at dinner and announce that I wanted to work with Dad when I grew up, even though I had only the faintest grasp of what Dad actually did. Then I would go to bed, and when I woke up, the year would have magically gone in the middle of the night.

Do I have a point with that story? Well, not to belabor the whole childhood innocence thing, but I had a good time on those New Year’s Eves (and I got to bed at a decent hour). I didn’t know the first thing about champagne or having to kiss somebody at midnight, but I still enjoyed myself. These days, I feel almost pressured to have a wonderful time on New Year’s, which makes it that much harder to have fun. This year, I plan to keep it mellow. Happy New Year.

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