NogaNote:

At this point of the year I usually worry about time zipping past me unnoticed. People I met, barely discernible roadsigns darting by like meteors * with variably extended exposure time; events condense and expand as they keep moving towards and away from me, a Doppler-effect screech shift in tone imprinted in my memory. When I write my monthly cheques, my hand still hesitates over the 2006, even as 2007 is just 4 days away! I still remember, as a woman of twenty I thought the end of the millenium was an event far into the future. With the smug arrogance of the young, the idea that there was life, beauty, desire, longing, doubts after forty was a strange, unintelligible thought. I fully expected, by the time the millenium rolled in, to have acquired most of my knowledge and goals in life and thence coast along in some sort of tranquil, if not too exciting, an existence.

Well, here I am, at the gate of the seventh year into the third millenium, and I am still like that young woman of twenty, waiting for a sort of enlightened maturity to descend upon me and relieve me of all the torment and restlessness that come with ambition and eagerness for more: more life, more knowledge, more understanding, more skills, more love, more everything.

Here's what my favourite astrologer suggests for 2007:

In 2007, you'll need to find the power to do the half-right thing when it's impossible to do the totally right thing. To help you do that, remember this advice from Abraham Lincoln: "The true rule, in determining to embrace or reject anything, is not whether it have any evil in it; but whether it have more of evil than of good. There are few things wholly evil, or wholly good. Almost every thing is an inseparable compound of the two; so that our best judgment of the preponderance between them is continually demanded."

Looks like I'm told that what was will be. And decisions will be a balance of factors, as they always are. I guess this could also serve as an answer to my earlier question about "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly". The bad was almost wholly evil. The other two were compounds of the two. In the Ugly, the evil component was more predominant. In the Good, the good component was somewhat greater. So, by this measure, the villain with the most good in him (relatively speaking) wins the good name prize.

It is also interesting, btw, the the good and the bad were both intelligent. The ugly was an idiot.

* as the poet imagines.