As I stumbled around Jude’s pebbled driveway at the end of the 2012 countdown and as some guy kept playing “Love Will Tear Us Apart Again” from his iPhone 5 I thought this: it feels exactly the same as last year.

2012 ended too quickly. I wasted a shitload of time but still managed to be productive during some of it. I began writing a book of short stories and was even able to type out a few thousand words. For now, I’m naming it Surface Children. I’ve written a handful of stories so far and I’m only happy with two of them. One story is about an angry pregnant girl; another story is about Los Angeles Angie; another story is about Siem Reap; another story is about some guy who steals a girl from some other guy; one story is about Eva, another is about Jude, another is about Vail.

Anyway enough about that. The rest of the party ended without a bang. There was no vomiting girl and there was no crying guy and there was no argument. There were, however, a bunch of people hunched over their iPhones, texting other people or writing on their Facebook walls.

I asked a few friends what their New Year resolutions were. All of them said they didn’t have any, because whenever they set goals for themselves, they never ended up doing them. That had me thinking: what makes up a fulfilled life?

As I headed for my car, I wondered what 2013 had in store for me. Maybe it’ll be a good year. Maybe it’ll be an amazing year. Maybe there’ll be no dramas. Maybe no jobs will be lost. Maybe there’ll be no more recession. Maybe there’ll be nothing to protest about. Maybe there’ll be no more shootings or natural disasters or celebrity deaths or abusive drunk people on the street. Maybe all questions will be answered. Maybe every writer in the world will wake up one day and realise that they have nothing to write about anymore.