A very quiet new year's eve

Like I've said before in the past, I'm not really much of a party girl.

Which makes my life...a little less awesome. But hey, awesome's too overrated anyway.

"Babe, I just cleared the sink"
"Awesome!" 

"Hey, check out this awesome paper on colonoscopy"  

"Dude, why the hell do you do that?"
"'Cause it's awesome"

Basically, the word Awesome can be applied to anything. Even the mold growing between gramma's toes. (Dude...that thing is so gross it's awesome) Call me old fashioned but I wouldn't want to be compared to granny's foot cheese.

So yesterday - being New Year's Eve and all - instead of heading to Auto City for some down time partying, I called some of my closest friends for a pot luck at me mum's kindergarten. It was a small (And I mean small small. Like, four people small), quiet affair. We had our mashed potatoes and jellies and noodles and as the clock struck 12, toasted each other in pretty pink plastic cups of Coke.

It was a perfect New Year's Eve.

Because it wasn't just the end of a year for us. It was the end of one part of our lives and the beginning of another. I'll never wake up at 6 am again, dancing in my jammies getting ready for school. Or have dinner with my family every night. I'll never go back to my bedroom again and feel the same kind of warmth I did when I was six and believed that my blankets would protect me from the monster under my bed.

College starts on the 7th but I'll be moving into my new dorm on the 5th. That gives me about five days to go around yum cha-ing with all my old friends and figuring out what I want to do with my life.

That also gives me time to start thinking about the people I want to surround myself with. I've made a lot of five minute friends during my stint in KL. You know the type: Fun, party goers, fantastic to be around and there for about.....Oh, say....five minutes. Then they're gone. Like fireworks. And all that's left is darkness. (Woah. Woahwoahwoah. Talk about sounding emo)

But still, they're great to be around. Just not the kind of people I'd want to enter a new part of my life with.

So I called up the Nerd Herd + 1 (+1 being Raul Dhillon) and asked if they wanted to spend the countdown at me mum's kindergarten. It's a huge building filled with interconnected rooms and dolls sitting on shelves staring back at you. (Okay...so maybe not exactly the best place to be at 1 a.m.)

(Warning: geography content. In the Island of Dolls, Mexico,  islanders hang dolls on trees to appease the spirits)

These guys have been with me throughout the crap and the crappier and I figured, who better to spend the night the last few hours of the year planning our future? 

We were just a bunch of dumb teenagers talking about life, religion and politics, trying to figure out our way in life. But it was a sweet dumbness. I didn't care if half of what we said was shit, at least it wasn't bullshit. At least it wasn't the crap you learn to tell each other the older you get. It was an innocence I'm starting to realize that not everyone can keep as the grow older.

I pulled out sheets of paper and huge, kiddie crayons and as cliche as it sounds, we started writing down our new year resolutions together. Then as the clock struck twelve and year 2011 slipped away, we clinked our glasses together, took another sip of Coke and all I could remember thinking was thank god I'm not in a club, surrounded by people, dancing, drinking. Because something told me that I'd be lonelier than I would have been by myself. (But that's just me, heh.)

From top clockwise: Headless lil' me, Endu the sweet nerd, Abby the emo perfectionist and Raul the philosopher.

Here's to the new year. 

Here's to 360 more days of chasing our dreams and mending broken hearts 

Here's to a faulty camera angle cutting off half my face.

And here's my question:  

How do you know which people are your true friends?