~New Year Stuff
2005-01-02 - 2:59 p.m.

11:36 PM 1/01/2005

Wow, 2005 (or, as Dad unthinkingly called it today, "1985"!).

I thought that I was going to see the New Year in at home, with parents, going to bed "early". When Dianne rang the day before (New Year's Eve Eve?) saying she was inviting just a few people, such as Jer (Tim's brother) and Emma around for NYE I thought that sounded perfect. I don't care for big parties. I'd much rather be at home in bed, or at least playing games and singing songs and having fun, instead of being hot, uncomfortable, tired, socially strained etc. So having an unstressful evening out seemed like a good way of being able to say I did something on New Year's Eve without actually having to much. (Besides, I did feel like doing something little.)

Well, it turned out that Sally and her new boyfriend-baritone came along for a bit at the start, and then later on after midnight, too, one of Tim's friends came and a friend of Jer's with [the friend's] girlfriend. This all made me feel pretty awkward. It's not that they're un-nice people - Tim and Jer wouldn't really have friends that weren't lovely, and even Sally's boy wasn't that intimidating - it's just that they were the kind of people who were all "yay, drink, party, drinking games, drink" and I kinda don't have a way of slotting into that. Small talk is not my thing in the best of social situations, but small talk to people on the shadier side of tipsy is much harder.

Jer brought along his PS2 and his SingStar game, which was kinda fun, but I knew hardly any of the songs beyond a few lines of the chorus and it is such a competitive kind of passtime that there's actually a lot of pressure.

At midnight the guys were silly and kinda funny, prancing up and down the empty street waving their sparklers around. But it was funnish. And I obliged by having one shot, when I'd been drinking water all night. I don't like the taste of alcohol, getting drunk doesn't appeal to me all that much anyway, and I had to drive, albeit only 5 minutes to my cousin's place. But I can (proudly?) say that I skulled a cock-sucking cowboy shortly after midnight. It's funny really. I'm not against alcohol neccesarily, although I do believe in some kind of moderation in general (the whole "let's have all these parties just for the sake of getting ridiculously wasted" thing I slightly despise, even though many of my friends have gone through periods of this), but I just prefer not to drink. All I really need is a good mood and a bit of tiredness to find everything funny, with the bonus of retaining control of my legs and not suffering from a hangover the next day.

Probably my biggest fun kicked in when the guys, who were standing round Tim's computer, from which the music for the "party" was being played, started on John Farnham. I know John Farnham is daggy, but he's also a pretty fantastic singer and performer, even if his last three or four albums haven't been as good, and his last two I was uninterested in. I was drawn to the computer room by Burn For You, where the guys were singing heartfeltedly. I couldn't just stand back and not sing and soon Dianne joined us, too. At the end Dianne said, "hey, why're you singing, you're not drunk?!" and Jer's friend said passionately, "Hey, it's never not a good time to sing John Farnham!!" So captivated was he with his own profundity, that he declared this would be his motto for 2005, as well as insisting it was a bonding moment and making everyone have a group hug.

For the next hour or two, we all, joined by Emma, Sally sporadically (when she wasn't off singing very loud opera duets with her baritone) and some of the others, sang John Farnham classics. Dianne and I especially had fun with the songs off the live Full House album, which we've listened to so often we knew all of the funny ways he plays around with the songs. I do love singing, even if it is funny group singing gathered around a computer! When we'd exhausted all the well-known John Farnham songs, we moved onto some U2, Matchbox20, Crowded House. Some good, classic (especially 80s) stuff in there.

OK, bed now, finish this tomorrow (maybe).