I’m kind of a sucker for the thought, the idea of New Year’s as a time of reflection and maybe starting the year off on the right foot as the hackneyed notion might have it. Years in which I took charge and said “fuck it,” and did as I pleased on December 31 may have led to banner years. I don’t actually have any knowledge or examples of that, mind you, but it’s a notion.

For 2010, though, it hasn’t been one new year or new start. It’s been one a month.

It started with the actual calendar New Year’s Eve and Day. I was in Penang, Malaysia for crying out loud on the eve, and we headed to Bangkok, mother-fucking Thailand that first day. If the superstition is you set the tone on New Year’s and end up spending the rest of the year aligning with what went down on the holiday, I’m sunk. My everyday life just ain’t exotic enough to compete, although we have plenty of Tiger beer in the fridge. That’s close.

Rather than sweating on resolution tradition, I just wandered the streets of Asia soaking up sights and sounds and food, lots and lots of food, and focused on vacation.

One month after getting back and after resuming my normal existence, I got a second chance. We decided to celebrate the Lunar New Year, aka Chinese New Year, along with a whole chunk of the planet that likes a good firecracker and lantern-lighting time. I took this new year, the year of the tiger, as another time to contemplate the passing of time and assorted other bullshit deep thoughts. And, I drank more Tiger beer.

Shy of another month’s passing, and here I am again. Now, it’s time passing and mortality and the haunting air of death as I decay from this mortal coil. In other words, today was my birthday.

I think 46 is a strange age for me. Or, I’m strange at being it. My confusion begins and ends with the phrase “for your age.”

Mostly, folks say I don’t look my age or act my age, for that matter, and I don’t actually know what the fuck that means. Will there be a day when I mention the number and the look on the hearer’s face clearly telegraphs, “Oh, Jesus, yeah, you look every inch of that number?” If so, I hope maybe I’m dead or deaf the day before that happens.

On the looking my age, I’m always way more shocked in the opposite direction when someone my age looks 10 to 90 years older. I don’t know or have the trigger that gets that haircut that says, “Fuck it, world, helmets are easier to keep,” or “Frankly, why bother?” When do you go to the store and grab the easy care polyester blend sweat-shirt cardigan over the more comfortable anything with a little style? When will I launch the pastels and the Keds and go for the velour, will-never-see-a-track tracksuit or the the one-size-fits-all roominess from a catalog?

I want my pink hot and my jeans cool, damn-it. And, at this age, I can afford to buy what looks OK.

I see my peers with khaki, and I wince. There but god, go I, but by god I will not go. Nor will I buy a shuffling looking sun hat, nor eyeglasses with a line through the middle, holding on to my neck with a chain. Nor will I allow adorable prancing, applique kitties on my ample, aging bosom.

If I must applique, let it be skulls and bones.

Why should 40-something be sexless and dull and wall-flowered? The larger mystery for me is that I do meet folks who, I guess, are opting for gravitas or grown-upped-ness, and go overboard. Forties looking like 60s, at the same time that I know, and appreciate, people in their 60s, 70s and 80s having a lot more fun. When I stop having fun, I’m done.

And, now that I am older and wiser — For fuck’s sake, girls in your 20s, those grown up work clothes in polyester prints you bought for that first real job. Frumpy at 50 and just fucking sad at your age. Please stop, I have eyes and you doth offend them.

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