Welcome to 2005

Ringing in 2005 was a bit strange for me. I guess I felt like I was going into the New Year with a lot more pessimism than usual and just kinda felt depressed about things on a global and personal scale. 2004 wasn't necessarily a bad year for me, but I felt like not much happened or changed, it all just stagnated. And I'm realizing how much power I need to get things to change and I'm scared about not having that power and things just going on as they are.

By the time midnight rolled around, I felt a bit more in a celebratory mood and we headed out to light the fireworks we'd bought, but we were horribly overshadowed by some people in our street who'd bought a bunch of powerful, professional-style mortars. A small group of some very nice people had even come over to watch us set off our rockets, but after a few minutes they ditched us for the brillant display coming from our street (we were around the corner along the canal that's perpendicular to our street). I can't really blame them.

We walked around the neighbourhood a bit, but most of the good fireworks were done with, leaving only kids throwing little firecrackers at things and each other. It was hardly even 1 am. Maybe if people would save their damn fireworks until midnight instead of firing them off all week, the celebration would last a bit longer.

After we got home, we did our New Year's tradition of watching Jools Holland's HOOTenanny, which handily starts at 1 due to the time difference, allowing us time to do our fireworks thing first. I didn't know many of the artists playing (only Franz Ferdinand and Eric Clapton) but the mix of soul, rock, blues, funk and more is always a good mix for the first couple of hours of the new year. And I was much happier after a bit of champagne which got me pleasantly drunk instead of giving me a headache or making me feel sick like most stuff seems to do lately.

Another interesting New Year's tradition for me is to watch the Dutch cabaret act that is always about topics and events that were central to the outgoing year. It's interesting for me because each year I can understand it a bit better (and there's nothing harder to understand than comedy in another language done by comedians speaking very quickly). I've seen it for 6 New Year's now and I did pretty well this year, except when they spoke really fast. But I can still remember the first couple of years, just staring at the screen in utter incomprehensibleness. It's like a yearly measure of how my Dutch's come along. (Though it really only gets better in reading and listening, I don't speak it enough to improve my speaking skills.) While I may be able to understand better, I still for the life of me cannot learn the names of the two guys who usually do the New Year's act. I really like them (they're way better than when Freek de Jonge did it one year), but I still think of them as the guy who looks like Spud from Trainspotting and the guy with the strange lips and nose. As I watched them I couldn't for the life of me think of what either of their names were, or even what letter they started with. It's just something that's never stuck in my brain (though after the end of the show when I saw the credits, I'm starting to learn that the Spud-looking guy is Jansen).