"and I don't feel any different"

Death Cab for Cutie's song "The New Year" begins with the lyric, "So this is the new year; I don't feel any different. This is a common feeling, I think, for most people. Flipping the page on a calendar doesn't fundamentally change a whole lot in our lives. I feel no more different on January 1 than I would on, say, any given Monday. I had a particularly bad week last week, and more than a few people told me that I'd feel better once the new week started, as though entering a new row on the calendar would alter the reality that I live in. (Predictably, not much changed with the shift from Sunday to Monday.)

It's a new year, dear readers, and I don't feel any different. That's not to say that I feel indifferent to the coming year or that I'm cynical toward the future. Rather, I just feel like my life is plugging right along at the same pace that it always has. There's little sense in relying on the calendar to make your life interesting, really. Why wait for a new week, month, or year in the hopes that something interesting will happen to you when you can make something interesting happen now?

Mind you, that doesn't mean that I have anything interesting going on tonight.