New Year's Eve at the National Building Museum

Happy 2010! The Year of Nomofomo is officially underway. I kicked things off by attending--believe it or not--my very first real New Year's Eve party:


There's nothing about a big party like this that should inspire the kind of FOMO it does. I mean, before I left my house last night, I could have predicted what down: about 5 drinks, a long line of drunk preps at the door, a round of king-kong arms on the dance floor that caused me to splash my vodkaRedBull all over everyone, Ke$ha's "Tik Tok," raucous laughter, super-sincere compliments with the other girls in line for the bathroom, a slurry Serious Conversation About Life with my date, and, because this was a LateNightShots party, a strapping man in his late twenties urinating in the hallway on the way out ("yeah, sorry, sorry, there's just--God there's just no bathroom!" There was a bathroom.)

And no party would be complete without the Hot Mess who lost her wallet sobbing "this is me dying! THISISMEDYING!" in the corner of Z-Burger:

Yet I was so excited to go, and to be there, and if something had prevented me from going, I think I would have felt like I'd just let another life kumquat wither on the...tree? Vine? (I know nothing about weird produce, which is what Sunday's adventure will be about.) I know I'm not the only one at that party who felt that way.

I was so eager to break my New Year's tradition of lameness. In high school, as soon as I decided that I was over New Year's Rockin' Eve with my parents, I moved onto...New Year's Rockin' Eve with 2 or 3 friends. A couple of times we went down to the National Mall and wandered around aimlessly. Once, a cop saw us drinking Diet Coke outside and put us in his high beams, thinking we had beer. That was the most dangerous things got.

2004-2009 were much the same. With the exception of a night at the Knitting Factory in 2008, all of these featured some combination of 1-3 of my dearest friends, Dick Clark, and a reasonable bedtime. Last year I watched Pride and Prejudice and...modeled dragons out of Sculpey. For real.

So what was it like to shelf the Sculpey this year and boogie down with all the bow-tie wearing white men in Georgetown? Fun. Lots of fun. But that's because I got a chance to catch up with some of my favorite people in the world:

Matt Latimer;

Patrick Ryan and sissy Catherine Sproul;

anda guy in a smoking jacket. WTF?

...and that was precisely what I was doing all along with the dragons and the Diet Cokes and all those classic nights on the Mall with people I love who are all over the world now. Parties are great, but Mancini, Matt, JScarbs, Janet, Emily, Dan, Neil, Caitlin, I miss you so, so much. God, now I have Auld Lang Syne stuck in my head.