Christmas Eve.

How are you doing this holiday season?

I wasn't supposed to be alone tonight. Also, my sister wasn't supposed to be recovering from an emergency appendectomy that, it turns out, she may not have needed. Amazon wasn't supposed to forget to send my nephew's gift and give me a refund instead of Club Penguin for Nintendo. And my car wasn't supposed to be trapped a week past the big blizzard of '09, thanks to D.C.'s aversion to plowing side streets.

But when you are wrapping presents in your warm apartment with Christmas music playing and colored lights and plenty of food and water, and those presents are for family that you're going to see tomorrow (if you can get a ride), you start to realize you're a dick for moping around.

And how was your decade? If you're like most other people, according to the media, the millennium's opening salvo pretty much sucked for you. It's true that as a country, we took a beating in the 2000s. Accordingly, most of us did individually too. Is there anyone who had an awesome decade in the 2000s? Not even Tiger Woods can say so now.

Personally, a lot of bad shit went down for me this past decade. But isn't every decade like that? Does any one person have an "up" decade? I now think of the '80s that way, but I was in junior high and high school in the '80s, so it's a good bet that at this point I'm deluded. Maybe from the haze of the 2020s I'll think of the 2000s as pretty fricking super.

A lot of good stuff happened this decade too. For me, I left New York when it was my time to leave. I learned to cook, sort of. I met people too awesome to even imagine: my sister's children, for example. I texted. I had a life-changing night here.

I'm sure there's some other good stuff, I just can't think of it right now.

Some other thoughts this evening:

Cougar Town is OK, but not great.

Carol Burnett recorded a Christmas song. Who knew?

Church St. in Dupont Circle is next to a church. Duh.

The church bells at the church next to Church St. might actually make you a believer if you listen to them while you watch families leave services with glow sticks on Christmas Eve.

A Christmas Story is still perfect. It was perfect when my family decided to make a tradition of watching it on VHS on Christmas Eves in the '80s, and it's perfect now that TBS runs marathons and it's no longer our little secret.

I just broke my front tooth. Just now. On toffee. It's a crown. It's the second time I've broken a front-tooth crown in the last two months. I first broke my front teeth when I fell down in an icy parking lot in December seven years ago. Ever since then I've had porcelain front teeth, and I've had dreams where my teeth fall out or break. This is the decade of those dreams coming true.

Here's to no broken teeth in the 2010s. Here's to your holiday and your 2010s.