But we’ve wander’d mony a weary fit, sin’ auld lang syne

New Haven. Spring 1995. Room 123 in the Kline Geology Lab. Reknowned professor Elisabeth Vrba lectures on Paleontology and Evolutionary Theory. I doze fitfully near the back of the darkened hall.

I trudged dutifully across campus for nearly every lecture, I listened, fascinated, scribbling notes with frantic intent. Yet inevitably within 15 minutes my eyelids would sag, my writing would become unintelligible as my pen left a series of parallel marks trailing off from half-formed words. I would shift in my seat and struggle to pay attention, fighting with all my willpower to remain aware and focussed, pinching my cheeks, tapping my foot, leaning forward. I'd guiltily calculate the tuition dollars that were uselessly dissolving away with my glazing vision and shot at an A. But it was hopeless.

The lecture would melt into the elaborate and ridiculous dreams from the grey area at the edge of oblivion, where tusked antelope roamed across my subconscious with herds of 3-toed horses who'd tell me of the wrinkled peas plucked by the titanothere which awaited me in Gould's rose garden while Mendel wrestled Lamarck amidst the precambrian muds. And in what seemed like mere moments, the lights would brighten, the reading assignments were being handed out, and I would close my notebook, rubbing my eyes and wondering what had just happened.

And so it was with 2006. I have just emerged from a dreamworld wormhole where the many things that have happened seem as though they may have not occured at all but for within the torporific haze of daydream. The lights are raised, people are collecting their things, 2007 has arrived, and my 2006 is littering the alley, scattering before the breeze.

So, here's to being enrolled in a new year. May the best of last year be the worst of the new; may it capture our attention, engage our imagination, thrill us, teach us; may it proceed at a comfortable pace; and may it be memorable beyond compare.