I Eat Rainbows

Earlier, on Sohum’s brain

Here comes 2007. About 8 seconds left now. The noise is like a dull roar in my ears. Oh look, there are the fireworks! Ha.

And now 2007 is officially here. Funny. I don’t feel very different.

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What is it with people and celebrating New Year? So the Earth has reached the exact point it was one year ago. You can say that for every other point in its orbit.

We celebrated the new millenium at midnight on December 31st 1999, not December 31st 2000, so that’s not right already, but how is one point in the orbit of this planet around it’s parent star, given significance by the number of appendages coming out of the major grasping limbs of one particular species living on it, any different from another?

It’s completely arbitrary.

Most of our holidays have lost whatever significance they had by random decisions. The alleged-but-probably-incorrect birthday of a guy who Douglas Adams famously described as “nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to each other for a change.” The eve of a holy day for the praising of saints; now a carved pumpkin.

Independence Days don’t make sense, now that the whole world sees itself as an entity (see the United Nations). Celebrating the day you killed Saddam Hussein (as I bet people will, in the future) is idiotic, as you’re celebrating the wilful, purposeful murder of someone who didn’t conform to your worldview.

I resolve for the New Year that I will be less cynical.

We enjoy celebrating things. It makes us feel as if something is going right. And since there is not much in the world to celebrate, we pick random things out of the air and decide they’re important.

Do we really have anything left to celebrate?

Spray of fireworks, originally uploaded by sohumb.

I like this photo. There’s a spray of fireworks, there’s a reflected spray, and there’s one solitary light in the far end.