Happy New Year!

Hello there dear ProCrasstheNationeers,

I bid you all a year of happy and new.

2013 is a reality now, and I have yet to write 2012 on any formal writing, email, forms, etc.

Am I finally ahead of the curve? Just slightly? Or is the 2013 such a formidable number, that it lays waste to the habitual rendering of its predecessor in most instances for me?

Naturally, 2013 would follow any of the years that have recently passed. Somehow, it has escaped my attention in anticipation. Say 2000, or 2001, or even 2010, these all held some convention for me. Albeit, icons for their pop-cultural value. Yes, the Y2K bug was of mild concern to me, and I certainly partied like it was 1999 all the way into the nascent 2000. Also, 2001 and 2010 were of an idea that I collected from watching the respective films that bore their numbers within their titles.

Yet as they happened, I still didn’t fully feel as if the reality of the year had arrived when these years hit. Sure we could loosely pull together many associations from the movies that may or may not be a reality in our present world, but I can assure my foggy expectations, that for the most part, the world these movies delivered does not wholly exist in reality. I love it when my disorganized and lazy expectations are devoured by time.

What should I expect?

Just the other day, I had to toggle my age from a selection box on some website. The scroll-bar to find the year of my birth, somehow gets further and further from the current year. Yikes! When did I start to lose time? How did my 1974 become less cute, and more harrowing in vision. Somehow that toggle box seems to represent more of the sand that has fallen in the egg timer, than the sand that’s left. That sand is certainly less plentiful then it seemed in 2000, 2001, or even 2010.

All right, you guessed it 2013 is a year closer to middle-age for me (middle age always starts at 40 in my egocentric kingdom). 40 is creeping, leering, and taunting me. I don’t know that I can muster an effort towards giving a shit that it looms large. Some would argue that this post is an indicator of mustering, but I go well where my madness takes me.

So it turns out that 2014 might be monumental in some ways, and anti-climactic in others. It marks another date, another pass of the ol’ globeroo around the sun. It marks a way to measure perceived reality from ago to until. For these I am grateful. I do not go gentle into this good date, and will bitch about it in one way or another. This, I realize gives it power. Without acknowledgment it would flounder and bear no true relevance to anything or anyone. But I persist. An approach to middle-age can be whatever I make of it. I can bite it off and spit it into the hole that is carrying the sand further away, or I can stick my finger in the hole and try to prevent the inevitable. Somehow sticking my finger in the hole seems like too much foreplay for fate. So I say, come ahead. I anticipate that when the year rolls over from 2013 to 2014, that the toggle bar will be a little longer, I’ll be a little whiter of hair. The only thing that will be of consequence; is that 2014 will retire to the graveyard of disorganized and lazy expectations that have been washed away by what is more real.

There is hope and freedom in acceptance. Perhaps, unexpectedly, that is what 2013 is all about for me. Let’s find out. I’ll let you know when the time comes.