The New Year is a collaboration of the known awful and the potentially more awful.
Which is why it is also heralded in with a large amount of drinking and regret.
Whether the tradition is purely worldwide or whether New Zealanders just do it better than everyone else, every New Year's I can remember has involved someone doing something that has, if not tainted the entire forthcoming year completely, has at least cut a significant three-day chunk out of their memory, rendering the commemorative palaver pointless in the first place.
Then there are New Year's resolutions: personal goals and promises you make with yourself in the hope that if you tell them to enough people it will provide the motivation to actually carry them out. This, as it most often appears, is as futile as New Year's celebration itself.
Humans are rebellious creatures by nature. Less inclined to cannibalism than millennia past, but rebels nonetheless. Even the most orderly of characters gets an inexplicable inner satisfaction from testing all the non-tester deodorants in the supermarket or soaking the obnoxious gangsta kid at traffic lights by driving into a puddle.
Everyone, everywhere does these things sometimes - those that don't eventually become serial killers or children's show hosts. However, no matter how good natured the notion of goal-making may be, this too is inevitably self-destructive. Why?
Because resolutions, no matter how wholesome, kind or beneficial, are a task that must be completed. For the same reason I find myself violently fighting a sleep-in before work on Saturday, paddling through a veritable Everest of unwashed clothes come Monday and avoiding checking my bank account for weeks at a time, I refuse to stick to resolutions because I have to do them.
What starts as a harmless seedling of an idea becomes a chore, another box on the checklist, a duty that must be done. And as everyone knows, things that have to be done are no fun at all.
Yet, for all it's obvious technical flaws, the New Year has its sunny side.
Because just as much as a forecast to the future, New Year's is also the time to recollect what's already been, and in the case of 2011, realise it's probably only going to improve from here.
Canterbury-dwellers have lived in a blender since last September, child-abuse stats are looking dodgier than ever and, according to the politically active homeless in a town near you, New Zealand's poor are dying of poverty while the privileged 1 per cent bask in far-too-easily accumulated stacks of cash and a chronic ecstasy habit. Yes, short of a landslide re-election and a resulting Kardashian-led government, 2012 couldn't possibly be much worse than the year just passed.
We can't predict it's going to be a good year, though. That is simply setting ourselves up for an unhealthy amount of bitterness towards those chirpy holiday well-wishing types. Instead, we must sail through the occasion with zero expectations and a cool indifference to everything involving the year ahead.
Make reverse resolutions, expect doom and disaster and all will be well. The year might change, but Murphy's Law doesn't.
I wish you all a hideously average New Year. Now you might be pleasantly surprised.
