Ghost of New Year’s Past
New Year’s Eve this year was pretty tame for me: I spent it recovering from a nasty case of the stomach flu that pretty much left me unable to leave the house. Some friends of ours from the East Coast were in town and dropped by to talk, and the year rolled over into 2006 with us barely noticing. I got some phone calls from my crew in Las Vegas, who were taking it easy after having consumed yard-long glasses of Long Island Iced Tea the previous night. Sometime not too long after midnight, I gratefully crawled into bed to get some rest before I had to start work in the morning.
I’ve had other New Year’s Eves that haven’t been quite as uneventful.
When ‘96 rolled over into ‘97 I found myself at the house of my friends Mark and Catherine in University City. They were recent graduates of UCSD, and my fellow servers at Marie Callender’s in Coronado. I was nineteen; I think they were both about twenty-three then. I think I was completely in love with Catherine at the time, because she was totally hot, and by far away the most awesome chick I knew. Her boyfriend Mark seemed like kind of a putz by comparison, and I thought about punching him a couple of times just on principle, but we actually got along pretty well.
