New Year's. Wh00t.

Lots of time spent on the phone with family in Texas; also some quality time spent on the phone with BFF, who is in New York. Forget ball-dropping: the best part of the New Year's evening, for me, is watching my favorite Russian New Year's cartoon: "Padal Proshlogodnij Sneg" - something like "Once, by yesteryear's snowfall..." It's a claymation about a middle-aged rural Russian fellow with rheumatism and a hilarious lisp being sent out by his wife on the 31st for a New Year's spruce. He then proceeds to get into various fantastical scrapes. Right now, for instance, he's holding a magic wand in one hand, and his other hand is up a tiger's butt. And now he's a cactus, shaving himself with an electric razor. And now he's a Cornucopia, except an empty one, and a parade of crows and tiny men is marching out of him, all carring miniature New Year's spruces. All this is being commented on by a very sarcastic narrator, who has long given up telling the story and now just bickers with the main character.

...

There. It's over. And on a rather melancholic note at that: the main character failed at his quest - the narrator says that when he went to get the spruce for the third time, it was already springtime, so he had to bring it back. The final shots have him sit on an iced-over bridge - his wife has kicked him out of the house for being a loser - and play a sad, wistful tune on a flute: the same nine-note phrase, over and over, which is gradually joined by other instruments, until it becomes a motif in a piece played by an orchestra during the closing credits.

Bedtime, I think. Happy New Year, everyone! Can you freaking believe it's 2008 already? In my mind's innermost, Reagan, Thatcher and Gorby are still in office...