retrospect or futurespect.
new year's is a strange sort of bird.
several years ago i theorized on my old blog that the only reason a big deal was made out of new year's aside from an excuse to party was so people wouldn't forget to change the year when writing cheques or signing documents. My perception of this has changed drastically, mainly because my friends page blog entries around this time of year has shown that a lot of people treat new year's as a significant symbolic landmark, almost as strong as their own birthday. they look back at what occurred in the past year and then create resolutions or goals for the new year to come.
i've never identified much with this sort of mentality. Retrospect or futurespect is something that i think about all the time and the strength of that retrospect or futurespect depend on variables that are more personal than some arbitrary date on our calendar year.
in fact, when i think about it more, it's not that those sorts of thoughts are even necessarily assigned to dates as they are to events or trends. i didn't do so well in music history classes where the prof placed heavy emphasis on hard date memorization, but i did awesome in stringing together why this composer wrote this piece of music in this way because of what happened before him, what sorts of attitudes changed from one era to another and why - the overall evolution of music through history.
my own history therefore has the same sort of paradigm. I don't always remember the day or even the year that i started working at symantec or went to that key undergrad composition recital that changed my career path at the time or broke up with kim or first tried out for the Crossmen &c, but i know how all of those things connect to each other and other things in my life and how they led me to where i am right now, and i can see how events surrounding those "hard" events helped create and influence those "milestones".
when it comes down to it, hard dates in *any* historical context personal or global aren't anything more than a symbolic handhold for us to be able to grasp things easily. sometimes for my own reference i'll use those dates to help me put the pieces together, but placing special significance to that one isolated moment just feels wrong. When i think of when Katie and i were still together and think of "celebratory milestones" such as a year anniversary or whatnot, i generally don't think of those moments as Special because i did my best to celebrate every moment of our relationship as a whole. and the events that led to our first going out, us living together, us breaking up - those single dates didn't define those moments as much as that "time period" and the chain of connections that made those events progress logically and naturally.
So to grasp onto a date that is defined not by me but by some pretense of a holiday and use it as a means of retrospect or futurespect makes even less sense to me and my context.
that being said, here's the first sentence of all of the *last* entries of each month in the past year because i'm hypocritical and because it's fun.
january: i took these a while ago before i moved all of my stuff in so i could have record of what the place was all about before i mucked it up.
february: aaa trip machine
march: *waves from the office*
april: here's another entry about how i deliberately put chaos into my life.
may: stumbled across this earlier today.
june: so recently i realized something about youtube video ratings, that i think there are two common ways of rating a video and the one that's more common creates a less than accurate compilation rating of the actual video.
july: it's good to know that even thirty years after the fact with all of the changes and maturity that i've gone through and all of the changes that telly has gone through, Blake's 7 is still a pretty fucking fantastic show.
august: enV mailin
september: i suspect that dr. weir is going to be saying, "i am locutus of borg" in the not too distant future.
october: fucking.
november: justin - you can go find a cheap plane ticket now.
december: http://www.kobayan.jp/location_test/jubeat.htm
oh, and thanks for all of the new year texts i got. you all are awesome. :)