Essay: The Bright Side of the Year

It's A Wonderful Launch

By Zack Budryk
QuailBellMagazine.com

I’m not boldly charting any new territory when I say 2016 bit the big one and didn’t let go. That’s true for almost everyone who’s not a white supremacist or gifted character actor Mahershala Ali. Through most of The Great Fuckyear, however, I had one big thing to look forward to: I’d secured the publication of my debut novel, Judith, a feminist crime thriller, and it was set to finally see the light of day in December. Eager to celebrate with my friends, who’d helped the project become a reality, I decided to arrange a launch party for the book in one of our favorite Washington, D.C., hangouts.
​

Well, as luck would have it, the old saw about announcing your plans and making God laugh holds true even for party planning, because on the first of November I was abruptly laid off from my job of nearly four years. After the initial shockwave, I took a few important steps such as applying for every available job I saw and figuring out severance and unemployment, but after that, I realized perhaps this wasn’t the time to be hosting parties. I navigated to the Facebook event I’d created and posted a message about how as much as I appreciated everyone’s support, throwing a party while between jobs seemed like whistling past the graveyard, financially, and the party would have to be, at the very least, postponed until after I found a new position. It seemed like that was it for now.

A few days later, however, my wife Raychel got a Facebook message from one of our best friends Alysha, a bridesmaid at our wedding, no less; Alysha lives in one of those satellite suburbs that is relatively close to the District but differs from the city in that parking is physically possible and, perhaps more importantly, she lives in an actual house, and she wanted to offer use of that house for the party. Raychel and I were both incredibly touched; we accepted the offer and hastily got back in touch to announce to the other guests that it was back on after all (this was post-election, so I noted the added incentive that Donald Trump would disapprove if he knew about it). The next week, I had to go back to my former office to turn in some paperwork. While there, an old work friend, Leslie, mentioned to me that in the wake of her wedding over the summer, she and her husband still had more liquor than they knew what to do with, and pledged it to Party 2.0. 

The hits just kept coming; when I went into the city for an interview in early December, I met another friend, Alyssa, for coffee afterwards, and she told me that within minutes of my initial announcement, she texted a mutual friend, Emily, to discuss putting on the party for me (Emily, for her part, had been preparing to text her at the same time). The message was clear: I might have hit a rough patch, befitting the 365 days of bad road down which most of us were sputtering, but I still had plenty of friends who thought I deserved a kickass party to celebrate my accomplishment.

The event itself went off the night of December 17, and it was everything I hoped it would be. We dressed to the nines, looking far more like an actual prom for nerds than the actual White House Correspondents Dinner; we toasted the book, as well as Caroline Wall, an absent friend who supported the project from day one. We laughed, drank and played Cards Against Humanity long into the night. When everyone had left but Raychel and I, the two of us sat with Alysha and her husband Nick and simply chatted, in part about the book but also about our lives, our future plans and our interests. Like Adam Duritz, I hope this year is better than the last. I’m crossing my fingers for a great new job soon (I have, for the record, made it to the second round of interviews with at least five places) and hoping a clean break with 2016 will alleviate some of our overall stress. But I am grateful and touched to be surrounded by people who care about me enough not to just host a party when I hit a snag, but to actually submit competing bids to host it. Whatever tomorrow may hold up its sleeve, or in its boot like the bad guy we thought was dead at the end of the movie, this one night of fun proved, by its very existence, that we won’t be facing it alone.
​