FIRST IMPRESSIONS: Column

Let's get New Year's Eve over with quickly
Youth is when you're allowed to stay up late on New Year's Eve. Middle age is when you're forced to. - Bill Vaughan, US columnist.

All of us recall a cornerstone New Year's Eve that we like to compare all others by.
Too often it's the year we only made it to 9.43pm because we started on the wine too early, or the one where we arrived at the big party to find just two geeks in the corner having an intense discussion about World of Warcraft.
I can't remember exactly what year the benchmark bomb for me was, only that it was one night in the '90s, when I stayed up late with my two brothers to see what the big deal was.
We sat through three hours of awful late-night '90s television until the screen suddenly turned dark blue at 11.59pm and a Pepsi logo popped up.
Then came the countdown, silent except for a dull beep that sounded with each number that flashed up, kind of like that bunker computer on Lost.
Beep ... Beep ... Beep ... Beep ... Beep ... Happy New Year.
My brothers sat there on the couch, deflated and confused.
One snarled in angry disbelief: "Nah, that can't have been it. Must've just been a Pepsi ad ... oh what? It's 12.01. Bastards!"
And it's depressing to think that every New Year's Eve since has proven some variation of that first night.
Each has involved the same baffling ritual of futility - that string of desperate last-minute texts from mates trying to make plans and the setting of those same foolish expectations - always falling flat with that same inevitable, Pepsi-flavoured fizz.
You think of the four-yearly giant-building that goes on in adidas ads before Rugby World Cups. Three years ago, there was Richie McCaw, God-like and powering up a mountain into the morning sunlight and the ridiculous promise of "Impossible Is Nothing".
But we ate it up anyway, just as we did in 2003 and in 1999.
We were still chewing on it when the All Blacks choked as they were probably always going to, with McCaw describing his team's pathetic quarter-final exit as "a day you try to forget".
What a perfect way to sum up Y2K.
The world was supposed to be self-destructing but the only thing going off in Stratford at midnight was a fat guy wailing Dave Dobbyn covers in a rain-soaked car park, watched on by three desperate revellers huddled beneath silage wrap.
Then there was Mount Maunganui, in 2002, infamous for its tweenies, its awful Beatles tribute band, its beer bottle that found its way from a Marine Parade balcony to my left leg but fondly remembered for a can of baked beans an old homeless lady cooked over a beachside campfire for me.
If you're reading this, old homeless lady, then thank you for the relative comfort you offered.
At Urenui in Taranaki, 2004 - the New Year's Eve my mate had promised us would be, as we say in Taranaki, like no other - my girlfriend and I celebrated the arrival of 2005 by clinking cups of lemonade from within a tent being vomited upon by a drunken 13-year-old.
Said mate greeted us the next morning: "How was your night guys? Awesome? We've gotta do it again next year, right?"
He gathered from our stony silence that there would never be a "next year" at Urenui.
Too many inane episodes like Urenui have reinforced my pessimistic opinion that on New Year's Eve, you might as well just rent yourself a movie starring actor Matthew McConaughey.
That way the let-down will cost far less and spare you a hangover.
So I should be committing myself to Ghosts of Girlfriends Past or the more aptly-titled Failure to Launch this Friday night - but I won't be.
Instead, our seemingly bomb-proof plan involves friends, a nice restaurant, zero expectations and hopefully not a wobbly little bopper within a mile around.
To paraphrase Bill Vaughan, there used to be a time where we stayed up until midnight to see New Year's Day in.
On Friday, we're going to stay up to make sure New Year's Eve leaves.