New Year, Old Thoughts

Because I only salvaged two years’ worth of posts, I’ve lost most of my old silly thoughts on our New Year’s songs. Thus, I’ll do a quick recap: Every year we take a New Year’s song. Or should I say, we accept the one that’s given to us? For years, we would go to Albuquerque on New Year’s Eve and have dinner out and then go to a movie. The Hobbit and LOTR films carried us through many of those years. Long story short, we were usually driving when it struck midnight, and whatever was playing on the radio became our New Year’s song. As Albuquerque is no longer a close drive, we’ve had to find our New Year’s songs in other ways. One year, I think it was 2017, midnight rolled over just as the credits rolled on a movie we were streaming; the song that played during the credits was Europe’s The Final Countdown. A delightful song, and it was much fun to consider what it meant to our lives. Would we be going to Venus? Would the aliens there accept us? These were important questions to consider.

Going back a few years farther to New Year’s 2015, our song was Survivor’s Eye of the Tiger. The funny thing is when we’d gone Christmas shopping a couple of weeks earlier, we’d browsed a giant mall Big 5 store, and I’d marveled at the nice exercise clothes; mine were in virtual rags because it didn’t matter to me what I looked like when I was fulfilling my OCD urges to exercise. Looking at the price tags on these goods, I was startled by how expensive workout gear was. I suppose some people need expensive clothing to look fabulous at the gym…which is another strange concept to me. Huh, the gym is simply not practical when I can do perfectly good pushups on my Pilates mat. Another long story short, my husband quipped that I was like Rocky in the first film and had the Eye of the Tiger. That was why wearing rags didn’t matter to me. It was amusing when that became our New Year’s song.

I don’t like thinking about 2015 much. It was seven long years ago, and it was the year we moved to Roswell. It was a time of too much stress and too little writing on my part. I felt my soul disappearing down the drain every time I went to work at a job I hated, only to come home and stay up a few more hours to finish a backlog of editing projects I’d taken on. I was working sixteen-hour days and living in a ghetto apartment filled with catty welfare moms, despite that I had a perfectly good house in the River Valley (yes, I’m sure I was a big complainer, too). It took me a few years, in fact, to finish The Minäverse that I’d started in 2014 and to continue taking classes and playing the accordion. It took me another few years to be okay with Roswell because Roswell brought me face to face with a culture I didn’t get along with — Texas redneck culture.

Fast forward to New Year 2022, and we were listening to a streaming eighties’ channel (I would’ve chosen Mexican music, but you know how it is…); what do you think came on at the stroke of midnight? If you guessed Eye of the Tiger, you are correct. Only, I don’t like to think of what that song entails. Having a focused eye is one thing, but think about the symmetry of this song playing for us this year: it’s been seven years since we moved to Roswell — we always make big changes in our lives every seven years — and we plan to move back to the River Valley this year, as well. How…? Why…? The New Year’s song is a silly little thing we do instead of resolutions. Do you think maybe God has a sense of humor? I wonder sometimes. I mean, I know he does, or we humans wouldn’t be so inclined towards a desire to laugh. We are made in his image, after all.

The only thing I ask of this year is that I don’t work sixteen-hour days editing and being a customer service representative. I’m not cut out for customer service, even though I will always be a workaholic to some extent. By the way, another funny symmetry just occurred to me. I actually did make a New Year’s resolution in 2015. I resolved to read a book a week because I’d largely stopped reading for fun due to editing so many books. Anyway, I made a resolution this year to read a book a week in Spanish. Yes, in Spanish. I’m currently reading a frou-frou romance because I didn’t want to start with sophisticated vocabulary. It turns out the book was written in Spain Spanish, and thus, the vocabulary is still a bit out of my reach. I’ve always studied Mexican Spanish. Much of it is the same, obviously, but there are still a number of words I have to look up. Also, I’ve never learned the vosotros conjugations. Oh, well, I guess there’s a first time for everything.

Here’s to having the Eye of the Tiger. Most of my goals are already daily habits: exercise, study Spanish and Finnish, write and edit my books, play the accordion. Right now, I’m working on the PenTriagon sequel, editing the Breakin’ Good book, and I’m learning a song on the accordion called La Del Moño Colorado. It has a simple accordion part, but most of the songs I learn do. I’m no great musician. Oh, hey, why not leave you with that song below instead of an old eighties’ song? Watch the whole video because the dancing is truly amazing. If it’s one thing I despise most about our American Protestant culture, it’s giving up codified couple dancing. Protestant men can’t or won’t dance. Such a shame.