Take a peek at that date up there, will ya? Doesn't it just look kinda funny? Since 2000 has come around, shouldn't I have a robot typing this up for me and cleaning out the litter box? The future has arrived and, frankly, it doesn't seem all that different from the past.

It's all science fiction's fault, I tell ya! That's what I get for inheriting some of my dad's taste for science fiction. Curse you, Asimov and Roddenberry! Curse you, Jetsons!

When I was a kid I was thrilled at the prospect of being around when the calendar flipped over to 2000. Like most kids, I suppose, I figured out that I'd be 33. Wow, I'll be so old!

Now that it's actually happened, it all feels so anti-climatic. Just another day. I'm glad I had the 3 1/2 day weekend, but beyond that...nothing.

I know that part of it is that I had a very uneventful New Year's Eve. I didn't make any plans, perhaps hoping that someone or something would just pop up. That didn't happen, and since all of my friends had made previous plans which I didn't feel comfortable horning in on, I decided, to hell with it. Just another freaking day, right?

Wrong. As I sat at home, watching the clock tick and trying to avoid all the hoopla on TV, I felt myself becoming more and more depressed. Finally, I just couldn't take it any more. So I picked up the free weekly, checked out the movie times, and took myself to see a 10:30 showing of Man in the Moon.

I left early, hoping to get a cup of coffee in the neighborhood of the theater before the movie. That was a lost cause. After walking for half an hour in the forty-seven degree temperatures, I discovered not a damn thing was open, except for bars, which I had no desire to enter. Shit.

(Though, in my walk, I encountered an older bearded gentleman dressed in a black trenchcoat and black fedora with a furled black umbrella. He wished me a jaunty Happy New Year as he passed. I returned his greeting and, for a moment, a smile brushed my lips. It was nice.)

So back to the theater, where I got substandard coffee. Entering the theater, I was happy to see only a few people there, and thankfully no late-comers came to sit near me, which happens all too often, even in empty theaters.

The movie itself didn't do much for me. The acting was good (Jim Carrey's Andy Kaufman was scary, it seemed so accurate), but I really couldn't get into the story, for some reason. I felt the best part was the very beginning (brilliant, really), but besides that...ehn.

The highlight for me was during the Carnegie Hall scenes. A friend of mine was an extra and sat in front of Courtney Love and Danny DeVito. Every time they were shown my friend was also onscreen, in the lower left corner of the screen. Mentally I jumped up and down, yelling, "Hi Steve!", though in reality I barely moved a muscle.

At some point a couple of people shouted "Happy New Year" and popped some poppers, which caused me to smile at them in the darkness, while secretly thinking, "Hey, I came here to forget about the New Year!"

Afterwards I just went home, indulged in some self-pitying tears, then went to bed to try to rest up from my stupid cold.

Said cold finally cleared up last week, for which I was grateful. I was getting sick and tired of being sick and tired.

Now that the calendar has turned to mid-January, I'm feeling in much better spirits. I have a tendency to get trapped in little pockets of depression, mainly over the state of my love life (or lack thereof). This is the longest I've ever gone without a relationship since I was 22 and it's more than a little weird for me. I haven't even been on a date since April of '98. (I can't imagine what I'd be like if I'd been celibate this whole time. *shudder* I'm glad I've had sex on an average of once every six months.)

So I've decided to remedy my current situation. I've signed up with an on-line dating service. It's not the first time. Late '97 to early '98 I dated a lot due to the service I've re-joined. And it was pretty fun meeting so many different guys. But I got burned out on the whole dating scene after about six months, so I just stopped it for a while. (Especially since that period of time was the first time I'd ever really dated. All of my previous relationships were either with guys who were already friends or someone I just kind of fell into a relationship with.) I've already gotten a fair number of e-mails (but not at my personal e-mail address, since the service has a personal inbox for all members) and I've answered about half of them. They all look pretty promising. Don't worry, I'll keep you apprised of what happens.

By the way, my home computer is working again. After having joked with my dad about how everything should be fine now that 1999 is over, he came over to my place, looked at the computer and couldn't find anything wrong. He launched AOL (which I hate, but I can use my beloved Netscape to surf and it's on his membership, so I don't have to pay a thing) and, lo and behold, everything connected fine. I haven't had a problem since.

I guess it really was just a bad computer year for me!