Spades to ring in the new year

Rang in the new year playing spades at a party with my mother and her best friend, with myself partnered with a terrible drunk. I had fun despite my clueless partner. We won, not that that matters.

New years day (or most of it) will be spent making my house a home.

I want to put some kind of quote here to presage the new year. I'll see if I can come up with something tomorrow when I have access to my library.

I have it.

Tonight, as I was playing spades, we paused, it's true, to watch the ball drop in New york, over network television, time delayed to match up with our midnight. When the ball dropped, they started panning through the crowds, and swapping cameras to view various areas. One place they kept coming back to was, of course, a shot looking across Times Square.

In Times Square there're these marquees (accent missing because I couldn't remember where it goes) which display news headlines. Apparently these marquees aren't under the control of the news network running the show, because above the heads of all these gleefully screaming people were headlines referring to suicide statistics, murder charges, and the devastating damage done to the Asian coastline by the tsunami.

So, the quote, appropriately gothic (I'm being honest with myself for a moment - I enjoy the bittersweet quotes very much, and usually restrain my desire to quote them) - A line from Neil Gaiman's Signal To Noise - A dying film director talking about his last screenplay.

The world is always ending, for someone. It's a good line. I give it to the father of the child. He says it to his wife. "The world is always ending, for someone", he says. She is trying to quieten the baby, and does not hear him. I doubt it would matter if she did. ... We are always living in the final days. What have you got? A hundred years or much, much less until the end of your world.

On the surface, this isn't an encouraging sentiment, I know. Nevertheless, it's heartening to me to think about. The end of the world, really, is an artificial thing. We decide when it happens, or when it happened. People are always talking about apocalypses.

Only, I don't believe in Apocalypses. I believe in Apocatastases. I think it may be the title for The Film. It's a bitch to pronounce, and no-one knows what it means, but otherwise it's a great title.
(more from Signal to Noise)

Apocatastasis. What it means:

1) Restoration, re-establishment, renovation

2) Return to a previous condition

3) (Astronomy) Return to the same apparent position, completion of a period of revolution.

Think about it.

Home.

Today, I came home. Even a couple days living with my dear mother resulted in a little bit of the trapped-animal feeling of homelessness, lack of my own personal space - though I claimed a couch that's usually so covered in pillows as to be unusable as my own. Now, I have my own space. We'll see how long it takes for me to go mad.

The boxes of books in my library are now at least _only in the library_... instead of leaking out into the living room. The living room has DVD cases and a few boxes lying around, since I haven't quite figured out what to do with the videogame systems.

The house overall is full of a little over a grand in debt to my mother beyond the rent check which she paid (since I don't get paid till the 3rd). I have a kitchen. Pots, pans, cooking utensils and whatnot, dishes, all the stuff I've been borrowing from Rae since we moved out of Ground Zero and she moved north.

Obviously, my net's working. I'm hoping the occasional hiccups I've been seeing are transient - a result of the drenchpour we've had the last couple days and the fact that it's the new year.

My couch is comfy. I'll see if I can get a good night's sleep on it tonight *gets a silly grin*

Really, though, it feels like home. I've christened the kitchen gear to make myself ravioli. At the moment, it's a big exhalation - a relaxation between efforts. I am still nervous about the job. That'll only quiet once I know they like me, and I like them.

I found my remotes. Kill Bill is on (since I bought it with a Holiday gift card to blockbuster, earlier), and I'm warm and happy. God bless. It is a good day.