2013. I don’t know what to think anymore at the beginning of a new year. Used to be I’d get excited, or depressed, thinking of the endless possibilities or the hardships ahead. Now, well, I’m not so sure what my attitude should be. It’s just another day. Another year. Much like the day before, the year before… the one before, and the one before that. It’s so arbitrary, the new year, isn’t it? The Chinese don’t even celebrate it till weeks after we do. Yet, here we are, every year, doing something on the night between December 31st and January first, doing something or nothing, purposefully, intentionally, willingly. But what, exactly, makes this day, this night, anymore special than the one before, or after? Kind of like starting a diet on Mondays, diets started on Sunday or Tuesday are just as effective. The point is starting.

I woke up with a headache today. The last week of 2012 was terrible, comparatively, as a first week of vacation. I was horribly (survivably) sick, I went through two courses of antibiotics, steroids, and loads of other stuff, I’m still not great, but the minute I was up again the husband got sick, in one of those cruel parenting turn-taking jokes of the universe. We’re all sniffely, not able to really enjoy our vacation, to see our friends, to get our shopping done, to go eat at the restaurants we dream of all year. When you live so far from home so much expectation rides on these fleeting trips home that being felled by the flu feels like something akin to tragedy.

This week we’re going to make the best of it, try to make it to the Space Center, to a couple of restaurants, to some stores, I’m hopefully doing a cake decorating course I reserved weeks ago, see some friends… But the New Year? No sir, no ma’am. I’m not ready for the hopeful, exciting, new beginning.

So this year I’m celebrating the new year when we get home, somewhere around the tenth or eleventh or so, when I’ve recharged my batteries. And I’ll be celebrating the ordinariness of my very mundane life, cause that’s the one I live everyday. Cause this year my life is not going to be about the one, special, out of the ordinary day, the New Year’s Day, the anticipated trip home, the once in a lifetime occasion, the extraoradinary, this year I’m celebrating my every day, day after day, with the sniffles and the disappointments, and the anger, and the unexpected joys and surprises, the laughter, the tears, the yelling, the fighting and the joy.

I’m sick of the specialness of special occasions, I’m ready for the ordinariness of ordinary life. Maybe I’m at the brink of middle-agedness, and that colors my outlook on life, but I figure I have many more ordinary days ahead of me than extraordinary ones and I should make them all count.

Another day, another year, that’s special enough. Isn’t it?