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** MEMBER #1439 of the CANADIAN PAPER MONEY SOCIETY **
 ...AND WELCOME TO JANUARY! A: January! (and, to lesser extents, February and March) Have I mentioned that January is the month of the year I hate the most? Now, before you lynch me for starting this rant by mentioning something I hate, let me assure you that I considered saying "January is the month I like the least", but that would infer that a small part of me does, in fact, like January even a little. I also considered calling this rant a "blog", but I'm old-fashioned and have come to dislike the meaning of the word "blog" and what it represents. If you want to hear pointless rambling about the latest tidbit of information, go somewhere else. To me, a rant may have all sorts of negative connotations associated with it, but at least the person ranting has something useful to say. Anyhow, there's almost nothing nice I can think of saying about the month of January. It's cold, it's dark, and there is no holiday in sight after New Year's Day. If you love getting out of bed before sunrise, going outside to wipe the snow and chisel the ice off your car and driveway, then throw yourself into the morning traffic jam, you must be a winter enthusiast (though I have a few other names for people like you). The month of January has been particularly unkind toward me. In 2003, freezing rain fell overnight on New Year's Day, creating a continuous sheet of ice on residential roads and extending into the ditches along those roads. After coming home from the barn, I made the brain-dead decision to attempt to park on the road. As you can see from the picture above, my purple Cavalier lost any semblance of traction and ended up in the ditch. (And yes, that's a paved road beneath the ice in the foreground!) I made it out of the ditch again in about an hour with plenty of help. Later that same month, I had a costly car repair bill of over $2,100. I'm not saying that the repairs were necessary to correct damage done while I was trying to get out of the ditch, but as you may know, spinning your tires is not healthy for your wheels. In Janury 2004, my car was in the repair shop on two different occasions. First time was January 2nd to replace a leaky gas tank. Second time was toward the end of the month for a new gas line because the old one wore through and I lost nearly a whole tank of gas driving home from the barn that night in -20°C weather. On the bright side, I didn't get stranded on the side of road as a result of losing all of my gas. The reason I kept driving and lost most of my gas was that I thought the gas gauge itself was faulty (it reads differently depending on the season). To make my car woes of the past two Januaries seem like small potatoes, I lost my father following open heart surgery on January 4th, 2005. Fortunately, the forces in the universe that conspire to make my life a living hell at the start of every year decided that THAT was quite enough misery for one month. It was not until February that my mare (that's a female horse) got a nasty bout of mastitis that scared the piss out of me and made me think I was going to lose her too. The anitbiotics worked, and she recovered, but you tell me how a mare who has not foaled in the better part of a decade gets an infection in her udder, thereby causing it to swell like a balloon. If that's not enough bad luck, consider that the infection started on a Sunday, and I was completely unable to track down a veterinarian until the offices re-opened the next day. And of course, Monday's weather was... freezing rain! The jinx was broken in 2006 when nothing catastrophic happened whatsoever in January of that year. In fact, the entire winter season was abnormally warm and I enjoyed parts of it (when there wasn't freezing rain), so the nutcases (and winter enthusiasts) who point to human-induced global warming as the culprit can kiss my fat Anglophone behind. Here's a revelation for you global-warming lunatics; "The Day After Tomorrow" is a work of fiction, not a documentary! Anyhow, I was working two part-time jobs starting in January, and you people who have one full time job and think you have it bad can try working for two bosses, both of whom want to make sure they get their hours out of you. So we survived another year, and now we're expected to celebrate a day that amounts to nothing more than changing the calendar on the wall. After the decadence of the Christmas holidays, some people call New Year's a "fresh start" and they make resolutions as such. I'm not that short-sighted and hence I don't make resolutions. I've learned from life that Plan A rarely succeeds, and you'd better make Plans B, C, and D. The whole point of making resolutions is undermined by the fact that we are forced to "hit the ground running" as soon as we return to work. In other words, the return to the hectic workplace work pace is sudden and abrupt, completely opposite to the way work winds down slowly heading into Christmas. Labour Day is more of a realistic "beginning" for most people in September with school starting and summer vacations ending. However, Labour Day itself is such a sham holiday, much like New Year's Day. We celebrate labour by taking the day off? What a concept! So let's get a quick start to our New Year's resolutions by drinking until we're numb and then sleeping through the first morning of January. It's a procrastinator's delight. Why do we need reasons for holidays? One month before Labour Day, we have a long weekend here in Canada, and the Monday holiday doesn't even have a real name! It's often referred to as the "Civic holiday", a generic name if ever there was one, but different regions of Canada have different names for it. In Ontario, someone thought of calling it "Colonel By" day to commemorate the British general whose legacy is immortalized in the building of the Rideau Canal. That idea fell flat; getting Canadians to care about their history is about as pointless as getting them to care about municipal politics! So what do I call the August long weekend? "Darren Dreger's kegger weekend", named for the then-CTV Sportsnet reporter who coined it. That name, more than any other, holds up a mirror to what passes for a culture in this country. Unfortunately, without a tangible identity for the August long weekend, we have essentially lost the holiday itself. This past August, most stores were open, and only government employees were off work. Ergo, we need a definitive identity for holidays, otherwise the bloodthirsty retail business owners will push for longer hours of operation, and we all know how much choice the person working for minimum wage has in choosing when they can work, right? The laws of the land may say that an employee cannot be fired for refusing to work on a statutory holiday, but employers can always find (or invent) other reasons for ridding themselves of an uncooperative minion. (I know, I know, I'm supposed to be a heartless right-wing capitalist, but I look at the bigger picture in this situation, i.e., if a business cannot make a profit unless it opens on holidays, why should the employees have to suffer?) And so I believe that the revelry that accompanies New Year's celebrations has a subliminal meaning. People are actually saying "Let's party before the start of that fucking awful month when we have to return to our fucking jobs!!" I can only wish I was capable of not seeing the bigger picture, but in the spirit of the decaying season, I will make some realistic resolutions for myself (even though I said earlier that I wouldn't): I intend to fart, piss, and watch football this January because these are the only things I'll have time to do when I'm not working, shovelling snow, warming up my car, eating, or sleeping. And the only reason I have time to do these things is because I don't have kids (the two-legged variety)! |
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