Let's hope 2012 is a year of surprises! The good kind!
Rebecca has no life, so she spent her New Year's Eve visiting her sick grandma, then baby-sitting for some friends who do have lives. Yeah, I know what you're all thinking: "Someone asked you to baby-sit? You, who not only has no experience with kids but also hates them? What idiot did that?" It turns out it's actually a little creepy spending the night in a strange house with a dog and two sleeping kids. Especially when the house makes strange noises. I kinda felt like the baby-sitter in Paranormal Activity 3.
I hate to start 2012 on a depressing note, but on the last day of 2011 (yesterday), I got the worst news I'd heard all year. I had accepted that, barring miracles, 2012 would almost certainly be the year that Sable and Grandma both died. Like a naive fool, I had hoped they would go in that order. Now, that doesn't seem likely.
On New Year's 2011, I made the mistake of listening to Mairi Campbell's cover of "Auld Lang Syne." It's SO beautiful, but it's also depressing as all get-out, and it sent me into a bad funk for most of January. This year, I didn't want to go through that again (January will be depressing enough without any help!), so instead I listened to George Harrison's "When We Was Fab." George wrote it in the late '80s, looking back at Beatlemania. The Beatles were a huge part of George's life, for better and worse, so what amazes me about the song is that it's neither nostalgic nor bitter. George doesn't pine for those days, nor does he regret they ever happened; he's accepting. Long time ago, we was fab. Now, those days are over. Life goes on.
One thing I will say about Mairi Campbell's "Auld Lang Syne," however. She sings Robert Burns's original old Scotch lyrics, which most singers don't do because they include hard-to-understand lines like, "We twa hae rin aboot the braes and pud the gowans fine." I was geekily proud of myself when I understood every line perfectly the first time I heard the song. JM Barrie wrote most of his early novels in old Scotch, so I had to get very familiar with the dialect to read them.
If absolutely nothing else, 2012 should at least have some good new episodes of NCIS in it! (Although the returns of EJ and Ray this month do not have me excited. Ugh.)
I hate to start 2012 on a depressing note, but on the last day of 2011 (yesterday), I got the worst news I'd heard all year. I had accepted that, barring miracles, 2012 would almost certainly be the year that Sable and Grandma both died. Like a naive fool, I had hoped they would go in that order. Now, that doesn't seem likely.
On New Year's 2011, I made the mistake of listening to Mairi Campbell's cover of "Auld Lang Syne." It's SO beautiful, but it's also depressing as all get-out, and it sent me into a bad funk for most of January. This year, I didn't want to go through that again (January will be depressing enough without any help!), so instead I listened to George Harrison's "When We Was Fab." George wrote it in the late '80s, looking back at Beatlemania. The Beatles were a huge part of George's life, for better and worse, so what amazes me about the song is that it's neither nostalgic nor bitter. George doesn't pine for those days, nor does he regret they ever happened; he's accepting. Long time ago, we was fab. Now, those days are over. Life goes on.
One thing I will say about Mairi Campbell's "Auld Lang Syne," however. She sings Robert Burns's original old Scotch lyrics, which most singers don't do because they include hard-to-understand lines like, "We twa hae rin aboot the braes and pud the gowans fine." I was geekily proud of myself when I understood every line perfectly the first time I heard the song. JM Barrie wrote most of his early novels in old Scotch, so I had to get very familiar with the dialect to read them.
If absolutely nothing else, 2012 should at least have some good new episodes of NCIS in it! (Although the returns of EJ and Ray this month do not have me excited. Ugh.)