I don’t like New Year’s Eve.  I never have. It’s not that we have to look cheerful regardless of how we truly feel, put up with drunks, blow horns and sing the depressing  Auld Lang Syne about forgotten acquaintances and lost love. If it were only that. No, I think the real problem that I have with New Year’s Eve is that I don’t understand why we should be happy that one year is ending and that another one is beginning when what this really means is that we’re getting closer to the day we die. For the record, I am not afraid of dying, it’s the being dead forever part that kills me.

I’m sorry if you were looking for a cheerful post on the many great things I plan to do in 2013. I get weird on New Year’s Eve and my mind tends to wallow in  a sea of existentialism and nostalgia.

For example, I woke up thinking that today is the last day of the last month of 2012. The next time we will be able to write “December  ’12,”  it will be in 2112. Of course, when I say “we” I mean humans. I won’t be around by then. My children might make it if I’m successful in convincing them to eat vegetables more frequently than they do pizza and cheeseburgers, and if medicine continues to find ways to keep us alive longer.

This year I’m particularly affected by the fact that not only we are saying good-bye to an even-number year (I like even numbers), but that we are going to spend the next 365 days with the number 13.  Great.

But I’m a firm believer in the power of positive thought. I am anticipating that in 2013 I’ll have to call upon it more frequently and more fervently than in the past. As for my existentialist questions, while I don’t believe in a bearded man sitting on a throne in Heaven, I do believe that a Higher Intelligence & Spirit created us and is continually at work. True, I have some doubts about this when I listen to the likes of Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh, when I think of the NRA, when I watch today’s GOP and the Tea Party at work,  but maybe they do serve a purpose in the grand scheme of things, after all.

Time will tell as it usually does. In the meantime, I’d like to finish this post by wishing you, for this coming year, what I think is the most important thing: health. Health is wealth. Everything else can be achieved with effort, patience, and a bit (or a lot) of luck.

See you next year.