You know what’s wrong with New Year’s? It’s not the parties, or the time off, or the food, or the college football bowl games, or the spending time away from school or work to be with family and friends. It’s not the residual holiday cheer that people have, or the crazy sales at Best Buy, or the days where you wake up late, say “screw shovelling the driveway”, and eat leftover turkey and stuffing and Christmas candy for lunch and dinner. The problem with New Year’s is it doesn’t feel like a NEW YEAR at all. It doesn’t feel like the start of anything, except maybe another cold, windy, snow-filled stretch of calendar. It’s not even the start of a new season. Really, if we were going to plunk a “new year” down anywhere, we should have moved it into February, where only Valentine’s Day is around to distract us from the cold, the short days, the lack of sunlight, the lousy television, the boring mid-season Golden State versus Atlanta NBA telecasts, the Presidential addresses … okay, the point is, New Year’s only gets the “new year” treatment because we manufacture it. Everyone knows that September is the real start of the year, and I love it.
See, September feels like the start of something new. School, for one thing. As a kid, the start of the school year always felt like a real beginning, and that hasn’t changed. You get some new clothes. You meet new friends and reconnect with old ones. You get new classrooms and books and teacher/professor types. You promise your parents (and maybe yourself, if as a child you were really, really self-aware or as a high school or university student you think that these sorts of promises to yourself actually work) that this year will be different; good grades, lots of studying, not so much of the:
a) Partying
b) Surfing the web
c) Skipping class
d) Smoking behind the cafeteria
e) Picking on the girl in front of you
f) Not paying attention during story time
(Pick the one that’s most applicable to your age bracket and follow along).
In September, Notre Dame students get their first glimpse of the Dome after a long summer. Harvard students start crowding the locals out of Harvard Square in Cambridge. Ohio State students buy a new “F*ck Michigan” shirt. Duke students get in line for basketball tickets. Life begins anew. Everyone is caught up in their classes, every football team has a shot at the National title, everyone has money to go out for pizza and wings. Nobody has given you grief for having a Nick Lachey tune on your Ipod. The new guy/girl across the hall doesn’t know you try and do “the worm” when drunk. No one in your dorm went to your high school, so they don’t know your nickname was “Mama’s Boy”. The campus bar has rescinded your ban for last year’s “I’ll just lean over the bar and serve myself” incident. Professor Hates-your-guts is on sabbatical. Television is less about re-runs and more about new episodes of “24”, “House”, and “The Office”. It’s a whole new world!
Yes, a whole new world. And just like the made-up New Year in January, it’s time for a fresh start … in your classes, for the dining hall, in your dorm, for the football team’s “much-maligned” something (varies depending on location), for your gym attendance, for your job prospects. It’s a fresh start for all of us. First resolution? Screw January 1, because the new year starts now.
Dean Taylor is a Toronto-based writer. His weekly column is exclusive to NDToday.com and will appear every Monday. If you have any questions or comments for Dean, feel free to email him at deanltaylor@gmail.com.
