12.31.03 - 9:22 a.m.

I'm starting to think that New Year's Eve is just another way for me to reinforce my hermitlike tendencies. If no one is around to drag me out of my hermit hole (read: apartment), I'm just as content to drink a magnum of champagne all by my lonesome. Just another night in the Casey household.

Case in point: I rung in 2000, my last semester of undergrad, at the Pat McGee concert in Virginia. These were tickets bought months in advance -- no good way to back out of them. Yet I found myself alone in the hotel room once I had a drunken chance to escape from my friends. Totally missed the breakfast buffet so I could eat mac and cheese with my bare hands.

2001: Home from grad school for the winter break, I passed up plans to hang out with the college friends so I could stay home with my mother. There was, to my credit, the chance of a major winter storm coming through and I did have to go back to Chicago on the 2nd or 3rd, but I've traveled farther in fewer days in the past.

2002: Went to Philly with Dan to spend the night at Jaime and Dave's. We had good intentions of walking to a few bars and socializing with others, but copious amounts of food and drink in the apartment kept us there the entire night. Instead of being typical obnoxious twentysomethings, we stayed inside and played Chronology. And some other AWFUL game that involved actual thinking that made my head spin WAY before midnight.

2003: We have two choices this year -- drive to the shore for a party at Tom and Jen's, people I'm not always entirely thrilled to spend long amounts of time with, but decent people nonetheless who will probably put on a decent spread. This would also involve having Sober Dave drive us home at the end of the party, something else I'm not too excited to do. I have a thing against being on the road after midnight on The Eve.

Or we could sit in our apartment, split a bottle of champagne and make a few Sour Patch martinis. The hermit in me is rooting for this option, but even I know this is reaching the lowest of the low, scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of my antisocial tendencies. I already nixed the option of a party on the Upper East Side -- the least I could do is give Dan a chance to hang out with people other than his neurotic girlfriend all evening. He gave me the choice -- why, I have no clue -- of deciding where we're going, leaving himself with a potentially torturous New Year's. We really should leave the house, right? Right?