New year, same old me.

I'm never quite sure what we're supposed to make out of this New Year deal. Other than having to remember to write 2010 on things, I don't see that it matters much.

As usual, the gym was packed today with new members. People who have chosen January 2 to develop a new lifestyle and alter the way they do things. That choice will become irrelevant sometime in February or March when they revert to the way they have been doing things for the other 40-something years of their lives. I have seen it every January for the past 25 years and I suspect I'll see it for 25 more if I'm around long enough.

That is to say, it's human nature and we're susceptible to numbers and we feel as though the "first" of something is more significant than the ninth or twenty-third of something. It's why we overly celebrate even-numbered anniversaries of things and pass over the odd-numbered ones as though it makes a difference that it's the "Tenth-annual" celebration. Fourteen is a number too, but we don't get as worked-up over it as we do with numbers that end in zero or five.

I'm hearing and reading a lot of things about the "Best [whatever] of the decade" and it's difficult for me to remember things that happened 8 years ago and even more difficult to make a comparison between those things and something that happened last month. That's human nature too. We forget.

We have started a new decade - the Twenty Ten's? - and we have supposedly left behind all the things that the last decade - the Zeroes? - brought us. What we have actually done is started another calendar year. Nothing more and nothing less. We have managed to cycle through another tax season, another set of holidays, another set of birthdays and another year of our lives that the calendar tells us has gone by.

But it's still the same us.