Today: Celebrate the New Year

Happy New Year.

While New Year’s Day is traditionally celebrated on January 1^st, the anxiety of choosing a really good resolution coupled with a hangover and the biting cold of, well, January, doesn’t exactly thrill me.  But the start of a new school year?  Now that’s cause for celebration.

Sometimes, when life is feeling dull and uninspired, I stick my face in the supply closet and inhale deeply (I don’t huff the glue, promise).  The smell of file folders, crisp copy paper and–if they had a smell, paper clips–brings me back.

Remember shopping for school supplies?  I loved deciding which color three-subject notebooks would correspond with which class.  Social Studies was usually green (symbolic of all things geographic and land-based), Biology was blue (for the tears I shed while dissecting poor, helpless Kermit), and Math was obviously black. I don’t think I need to expound upon that.

The year I needed a graphing calculator was a low point for back to school shopping.  I am pretty sure I could launch nuclear submarines from that thing, but Heaven forbid I try to add or subtract.  I would have been better off with a simple slate and piece of chalk.

Yesterday marked the first day of school in Boston and to celebrate, I cleaned my desk, reorganized my pen and pencil cup and opened a fresh bottle of Purell.  I thought about all of the things I’d like to accomplish between now and June, and the small (and big) ways in which I can do and be better.  It’s sort of like deciding the summer between eighth and ninth grade that you’re only going to answer to the name Twinky, you get jazz and will ridicule anyone still listening to the Backstreet Boys, and you don’t eat anything orange… only it’s a bit more authentic.

I wonder if I will ever stop mapping my life by the academic calendar.

Also On Tap for Today:

• Remember those we’ve lost by giving the gift of life: Red Cross blood drives at Fenway Park (6a-1p) and City Hall (11a-6p)

What was your favorite school supply?  Did you ever get the lasers background in your school portrait?  If so, consider me jealous.