Happy New Year!! While everyone else makes resolutions to commence on January 1st, I tend to delay mine a bit.  Sure I miss out on the great deals for gym memberships but who wants to go to the gym in January anyway? Too crowded with all those other Resolutioners.  Plus, who has really finished off all their holiday baking by January 1and is ready to start their diet? That means you have to throw out all that delicious sugar or cheat on that new fad diet where you are only allowed to eat mushrooms grown by virgins in the Transylvanian forest.  So, yes, it is February but it is my New Year.  I wait for my birthday on February 2, otherwise known as Groundhog's day, to scheme up some resolutions.  The bonus is that I only have to stick it out 26 more days to say that I made it a whole month!

This year I am 36, a benign year for most.  None of the fan fare of 18 or 21 or 40 or even 30 itself.  And it fell on a Tuesday.  How much more bland can one get?  I looked up it's symbolism and numerology.  I can't say it made me feel warm and fuzzy.  Apparently it represents the devil or Satan.  So now I am 6x6 years old.  Evil squared!  It's amazing we make it to 40.

Not knowing the apparent evilness of this year, I have long had an intuition that this would be an important year in my life.  In my early teens as an optimistic, type A, goal driven perfectionist, I imagined that at age 36 I would get married.  You see, I had the whole thing planned out.  Exactly how long I would be in college, a couple years in the Peace Corp, 4 years of med school, residency, fellowship, and then after I had chosen where I would practice and was settling into my career, my knight in shinning armor would happen to be sitting there, at the end of the rainbow with his pet unicorn, just waiting to whisk me down the aisle.  So 36 seemed like just about the right timing for all that.

As it turned out, some of that actually happened as one might expect from a type A, goal driven perfectionist.  I went to college, skipped the Peace Corp in favor or research, went to medical school and finished residency but that is kinda where it dries up.  At that point the optimist in me was in hibernation with no thoughts of waking back up.  My type A was getting fat and looking more like B every day.  My only goal was to survive my shift without killing anyone. That fellowship got the middle finger and I got a job.  I was 33.