Rocking Around the Christmas Tree

As I steer my hot chocolate with a fork (there are no clean spoons left), I am looking at the remnants of the party and making mental notes: need to unstick damp potato chips from the floor, need to sort out clean and used glasses, or better just wash them all anyway, need to fish the cigarette butts out of the salad. The dishwasher is working on max capacity and the vacuum refused to work on New Year’s Day – I guess everybody needs a holiday…

My house look like a Christmas explosion, I have way too much stuff hanging on every wall of every room, and the sophisticated interior decorator (ahem) in me screams “it’s too much, it’s too much”, but hey, friends, when you have to endure three speeches minutes before the clock hits the twelve (two boring and one spiteful), when They do not let you forget about your worries and your strife, overdecorate and overindulge and party like animals.

Which we did.

Let’s see, last New Year’s Eve I was standing in the Museum Square in Amsterdam, high as a kite, the year before that, my friends and I got infused with Batumi cold rain down to our underwear, the year before that penniless hubby and I waited for the freakin ball in Times square to freakin fall for 8 hours, and the year before that we party hopped around Tbilisi. This was the first time we were going to celebrate New Year’s Eve in our apartment.

Which we did.

Several education-seeking friends from abroad graced us with their presence and brought stories from Stanford, Holland, Germany…beware our “foreign” friends, we will visit and trash your respectable places. One friend is leaving for Finland for three months (in the winter! In Finland! She will die!) and declared that she wanted to get fucked up drunk before she left our sunny country. My new co-workers showed up. Hubby’s co-workers showed up. Also, my girls. And the team. Well, I already wrote a love ode to the team, so I won’t go into more details now.

So we sang karaoke and drank and danced and went out in the freezing night to shoot the fireworks and it was fun and we forgot about all the bullshit around us.

We did.

This is a new year now. Last year I did cliff's notes of my annual existence and here’s the 2012 version:

• I quit the Ministry. No, I QUIT THE MINISTRY!!!!
• Got a new job at a disability NGO.
• Visited Baku and Yerevan and Colorado and New Orleans and Netherlands and Belgium.
• Co-organized a huge-ass conference on inclusive education.
• Got stabbed and poked with hormones and received other procedures. If I don’t visit gynecologist three times a month now, I feel like something’s missing in my life. Gotta procreate.
• Had a minor surgery.
• Learned my family member had a cancer.
• Organized a candy-gathering fundraiser (more on that later).
• Gained two freakin permanent kilos.
• Met cool new people.

  I guess that’s it. The year is over.

Funny, I hate cleaning after supras, but I’m fne with the after-party chaos. It reminds me of the last night.

The pic: the best Christmas tree in the world:-)