HAPPY 2008!

It’s that time of year again. I say that every time something date-worthy happens, which is almost once a month, if I calculate right but, being rather number-dyslexic, I could be way off the mark I am really aiming at. It is January 1, 2008, which will take some getting used to, as it always does. For almost 12 months now, I have been dating things 2007; I say ‘almost’ because it took a little while to get used to the fact that it was 2007 and no longer 2006. At work, it doesn’t really matter, since other people do most of that date stuff and anyway the computers do it automatically. And at home, why would I need to know what year it is, except when I am filling in checks, which I rarely need to do since everything became direct debit.

But 2008 is, as Father pointed out, a leap year. Which means that various friends who are born on February 29 will have a birthday – disconcertingly, they seem to be somehow younger than me, even though they actually came to this planet (this is assuming the extra-terrestrial origin of life theory) many years before I did. It also means that women have that traditionally (albeit a western concept) conferred freedom of being able to ask men for what they want in the whole man-woman thing, be it marriage or a date. I have seen many leap years come and go and no one that I know, even myself, has ever done anything like that. In reality, we do not need a special year that comes just once in four to ask for what we want; we are of a different ilk – we just take it, most often than not doing the polite thing if we feel like and saying a cursory ‘please’ just before we reach out and grab hold.

But in this new year, I am told, I am supposed to decide to do something. In other words, make a resolution. I never bother, because I never keep to it more than for a day or two, be it to never again play Solitaire when I am at work (of anywhere else, since it is a perniciously addictive game that should never have been invented or loaded on to computers) or to stay far away from that favourite shoe shop where I know my friend will create exactly the heel that I have always wanted when I want it. I rarely remember what the resolution is, never mind keep it, since I cannot be bothered to search my memory for a clue or four to figure it out. And since that aforementioned resolution is often made as a huge and giggle-some joke when I am chatting online or on the phone or across the lunch table with a close friend, I never take it all as seriously as perhaps I am supposed to do. Which means that any resolution I could make under those circumstances would inevitably be broken before the last fullstop is added to the sentence in which I make it.

But this year – surprise, surprise! – I actually do have a resolution. It has nothing to do with fibre, let me assure all those who believe that that is the sole obsession of my existence. It has nothing to do with getting back into shape and fitting into those extremely to-die-for floral-printed jeans, though that is part of my great plan for the next few months. And it has absolutely nothing to do with being more polite to people I do not like and gnashing my crocodile pearly whites at all those who believe that they should know me or, better yet, that I should know them. Those are incidentals. My resolve is more my own, nothing to do with anyone else, not really. I am going to grow up, at last, painful though the process has been and will continue to be. I will become less accepting, less trusting and less forgiving, more responsible, more proactive and far more analytical before I do anything, be it buying diamonds or frying fries or letting people into my life.

I think it’s called looking before I leap. And in this particular year, it seems moot.