Happy Imminent Activation of Next Calendar Cycle (or Happy New Year).
Yes, I said I’d see you next year, but with ‘next year’ being an hour or so away (unless you’re reading this in 2011), I hope you will forgive my previous misrepresentation. You might be wondering what I would most likely be doing in the minutes post Big Ben making a racket twelve times. More likely is the fact that you’re not really bothered.
In any case, the answer is : staying at home playing computer games!
Now, I can imagine some would respond to that comment with pity and most likely a superior sense of disdain.
Why, surely all normal people spend their New Year’s Eve, and the minutes and hours past midnight, consuming copious amounts of alcohol, flailing various limbs in an illogical expenditure of energy to brain pulsating techno and thereafter making inappropriate advances towards a fellow party goer, who turns out to be a wilting potted plant – right?
Now, I’ve tried this dancing thing once at a family party. When I say tried, I mean I was subjected to intense psychological manipulation, manhandled and forced under extreme duress to suffer an embarrassing trauma.
With all possible exits blocked by those purporting to be my family, I was left trapped and confused. Whilst feigning (unconvincingly) a sense of enjoyment by sporting a rictus grin, I clapped and shimmied with the grace and charisma of a cadaver subjected to electrolysis.
How dancing defeated the Batman.
I began to perspire, burning from a sense of self loathing. As the minutes passed, I realised I was metamorphosing into a cretin.
However a plan was being formed.
My eyes scanned for possible escape routes, those with minimal patrols and negligible exposure to electronic surveillance (the sweaty man with a video camera). Surely having mastered stealth and evasion tactics in computer game form, I could transfer these skills to reality? Alas, just as my past claims to be the Batman have proved erroneous, so was my confidence in this escape plan.
How not to extract one’s self from a situation of extreme duress.
After this ordeal, relatives would say something along the lines of “Now, wasn’t that enjoyable?! You seemed to have a good time!” Well as you can see here, that wasn’t really the case.
Now, to turn the tables on someone who has no interest whatsoever in gaming and force them to play computer games would seem ridiculous and stupid, as would deeming them somehow subcreature-esque for not wanting to partake in that kind of thing.
I mean, what good what it do to have a thermonuclear weapon pointed at Bruce Forsyth, whilst he wobbled on Strictly Come Dancing, imploring that under the threat of molecular annihilation he play Left 4 Dead 2? Not as much good as you’d think.
Of course, should you enjoy it then by all means go ahead, do what you want. Yes, even if it means doing the whole aforementioned prancing, shimmying thing. There you have the moral (or very thin excuse) for this story.
Dancing under duress: bad. Dancing whilst doused in burning petroleum: worse.
Whether you’ve decided to spend your New Year’s at home with family, out with friends, or severing the head of a gargantuan genetic abnormality that’s attempting to purloin your spleen, I hope you all have (or have had, as the case may be by the time you read this) a good one.
Or, at the very least, one that doesn’t rekindle a sense of abject horror when you look back on it.
