I Want January Back

Whoa. Wait. Where did January go?

Here's what I remember: I woke up on New Year's Day, promptly abandoned my resolution to do more sit-ups, and then got an e-mail from my friend, Anthony, in which he confessed utter incompetence when it comes to home repair. Suddenly it's February.

January slipped by so fast that I didn't even get time to make fun of Anthony. I was going to rectify that by designating this as "Make Fun of Anthony Month," but we're already a week in. By the time you read this, it will be mid-February and my making-fun-of-Anthony time will have been reduced to a fortnight.

Of course, no one in the United States knows what a fortnight is, so the first week of that will be spent running to the dictionary, which will then lead to arguments suggesting I should have called it "Make Fun of Anthony Bi-Week." And that will lead to arguments as to whether bi-weekly means "twice a week" or "once every two weeks" -- in a fit of unhelpfulness, the dictionary claims it is both.

I want January back. Clearly, some weird "Doctor Who"-like thief has snuck into my home and stolen a month of my life. Kids these days, with their hip-hop music and time theft.

What frustrates me most is that I find myself deposited in February, which is the least memorable month. No one ever says, "Gosh, that was a great February," or, "I say, chaps, remember February?"

March, now there's a month. It's got St. David's Day, Texas Independence Day, St. Patrick's Day and my birthday. March is a man's month. It's got 31 days; that's 31 days of celebrating the trifecta of fun: Celts, Texans and me.

February, though, is the time equivalent of Thunder Bay, Manitoba; It is wholly unremarkable and its only redeeming quality is that there's not very much of it. February is a placeholder. It's just 28 -- sometimes 29 -- days of waiting for March.

The fact that February is so unexceptional is, I think, what makes it hard for men to remember Valentine's Day. It's a horribly placed holiday, anyway, falling on the 14th of the month, which is right before most people get paid. So, you don't actually have any money to take a loved one out to that one restaurant where the food tastes the same as Denny's but costs six times as much.

I might argue for the removal of February from the calendar, but that would mean having lost two months of my life. I'm afraid I can't support that, even if it happens to be two months when "American Idol" is airing.

Time seems to be moving far more rapidly. Recently, I read a study showing that a person's perception of time really does change as they get older. Actually, that's a lie; I didn't read that recently -- I read it in 2002.

Regardless, the study suggested that older people have a faster internal clock. This strikes me as a terribly mean thing for the universe to do to people. As soon as we start to figure things out, it all speeds up. It's like taking someone fresh from their driving test and entering them in the Daytona 500.

Time plays with some people more than others. On Sunday night, my father e-mailed me pictures of the rest of my family opening their Christmas presents.

"We took these pictures last week," he told me. "We'll be celebrating your mother's birthday (which was in mid-January) next week."

Perhaps a better way to look at this is not that people lose their grasp of time as they age, but that they are simply refusing to play by its rules. I'm not old, I'm a rebel. I'm not gonna let your calendars hold me down, man.

So, January may have passed me by, but that's OK. I don't need January. I'll make due with whatever's left of February. Assuming, of course, that it still is February.

Chris Cope lives with his wife in Cardiff, Wales. His column appears every other Tuesday.