January 7: Firsts of the New Year

In Japan, the first time you do anything in the new year marks something special, so for this swap I was supposed to pay attention to my new years firsts, write about them, and send them over to my partner. While trying to feel better about spending new year's eve by myself, I thought about about how irrelevant the date is. It's not tied to the solar circumnavigation; there are no crops to harvest or solstices to honor. The reason January 1 begins the year is because that's the day Roman consuls took office. It really doesn't mean anything in the universal scheme of things, which is the only scheme I ascribe to these days. Armed with that attitude, I didn't notice the first time I did anything, except for what I wrote on this postcard of drunken root vegetables.

I flirted with someone I hadn't even met yet, not just for the first time in 2009, but for the first time in ... seven years? I don't usually feel instant connections with anyone, but something about this person made me want to ask questions, find out about him, get him to talk to me, try to seem interesting. I didn't do a very good job of it (my housemates are incredulous that I couldn't think of a reason to ask for his number), but it felt really good just having the experience, and knowing that I'm not an alien who only likes the people she already knows.

After I'd already mailed the postcard, a more momentous first happened that I wish I'd written about instead. As meaningful as it felt to me, flirting is a silly thing to be telling a German guy who is married with two kids, likes to cook, and is involved with civic affairs (all this from his swap-bot profile). I'd rather have told him what happened at the end of a vinyasa yoga class. We were in shivasana, and I'd been imagining a balloon of light expanding in various points of my body as the instructor called them out. When we got back to my brow, I felt tears welling up - not an uncommon occurence lately, but usually I stifle it because I'm on the trolley and I don't know why I'm crying. This time, I let it go. My head started buzzing, then my whole body, and I thought, "this is what joy feels like." I have been either profoundly depressed or emotionally deadened by antidepressants for longer than I know, and this is the first time in my memory when neither is true. Even when I feel bad about things, I feel good. I'm happy even when I'm sad! Hooray!

German man didn't mind the flirting tale, by the way; he wrote in reply, "That was a really impressive story."