Is this the most meaningless post I've written? Yes it is. Enjoy your slow deaths.

Human beings learn. I learn a little slower, but learn I do. I can now proudly declare that I know how to handle writer’s block – I simply write a blog post whining about not being able to write and before I know it I’m spouting poetry. No, I shall not exhibit verse right now. But what I shall do is kick off a long-postponed illustrating career by adding certain choice pages from my diary to make this post look longer. Ah, excited, are we? Spare yourself the anticipation, it’s just a bunch of cartoons. Ah, scowling now, are we? Just remember that you saw this post when you see the aforementioned pages once again, romantically withered and yellowed, for sale at some beautifully chandeliered auction house – for a staggering amount, naturally. Hey, it’s the New Year. I can dream.

Anyway, let us proceed to the obligatory analysis of the year gone past.

Great Event Number One: I lost weight. Yes, you may start rolling your eyes and rebuke my Bridget Jonesness, but anyone who understands the nature of the relationship I share with food will sign me up for a Nobel when they think of what I achieved. I think the great de-fattening started when my father, with a most unloving look in his eye, called me a skittle. A skittle, I tell you.

Something had to be done.

Skittles are really quite interesting, I think. At least they get to sway without getting drunk.

I don’t think my father anticipated twelve kilos lifting off my frame as a result of his remark, but it helped me slap myself in the face and tell myself I was getting obese, and it helped me gingerly step inside that hall of horrors – the gym, and it made me stick to it till I looked pleasantly overweight again. Of course, I then proceeded to eat everything in my way to make up for my sacrifices, but there is a point to this very pointless event – I realized I could be non-fickle when I want to. So look out. I shall now be Unwavering. I shall now be Decisive. I shall now be Staunch. Then again, maybe not.

Great Event Number Two: My parents, conveniently overlooking the fact that I would be going to college in a while and would therefore need their hard-earned money to get myself a degree, bought an apartment. I maintained a cold silence through most of the gushing descriptions of the locale, the dimensions and the floor space, mainly because I couldn’t understand a thing. I think I may be forgiven for resembling an overfed slug when confronted with statements like “It’s six by eight. Three by four windows. Plan C. The real estate guy said it would go for thirty-oh in four years.”

Grownups.

What I could make out from the flat was that it was too new to be loved, too angular to be comfortable, and too far away from my local superhero, the phuchkawallah. Grownups rarely understand why phuchkas are potentially life-saving pieces of paradise, and so we moved. It was rather fun, mainly because we had no idea how to pack. I began to read certain parts of Three Men in a Boat for inspiration – they packed like professionals compared to us.

My room is big! My room is airy! My room is clean! Oh wait, it's empty.

Great Event Number Three: I don’t know why I am including this, but I got myself a haircut. This is a Great Event for the simple reason that my hair is the only part of me I consider presentable, but hairdressers are morale killers of the highest order. The moment I walk in and sit down on one of those chairs so reminiscent of the horrid ones in dental clinics, I know I am Doomed. The suited lady will smile grimly, examine my head as if she were planning to serve it as the pièce de resistance at her dinner table that night, and proceed to give a small, fluttery sigh. She will then pinch her lips and tell me that my hair is limp, dry, weak, lustreless, discoloured, unhealthy and Not Fit For Human Observation. She will throw in scary words like Split Ends and Bald Patches and convince me that I am a disgrace to my sorry mane. It will not help that I will smile nervously and say, “Uh, it’s dead.” I will then tell her to just snip the ends, since she is so above actually cutting my hair, and then walk out of the place thanking my lucky stars I'm alive while she will glance thoughtfully at the torturechair and wonder how to stop scum like me from defiling it with my unfashionable presence.

Now you know why my hair has remained long since I was ten or so.

You think I'm paranoid, but I just know that they're spraying some toxin at me when they pretend to wet my hair.

But I did go to a hairdresser’s this year, and I did sing forty random songs to myself in my head to drown out the deathly snip-snip sounds, and I did allow her to cut off about four inches. I also did not yell when she held up a mirror behind my head and I saw two heads of hair, both ostensibly belonging to me. My hair still looked long to other people, and I cannot pretend to have fathomed what she did to it, but it seemed such a waste of time and money and nerves. I am now researching dreadlocks.

Great Event Number Four: The Boards. Here is why they are a Big Event. I hate having things forced on me. All my life I had this pact with my parents – my report card shows no red marks, and I do what I want with my time. I stuck to it, and managed sunnily, till these two people I thought were human morphed into epitomes of Responsibility and started telling me in very grave tones why my final exams were the Deciding Factor. Deciding Factor for what, I asked. Everything, it turned out.

Grownups.

If the creatures-who-used-to-be-my-parents and my teachers are to be believed, I shall have to go underground, change my name and get plastic surgery performed if this Big Event turns out wrong. Everyone around me seems to be getting The Talk too, but it doesn’t seem to help for the simple reason that it has struck all of us with a lethargy for any kind of goal-fulfilling. We are now the tragic results of reverse psychology.

The running is metaphorical, of course: I cannot run. Now the yell is a different matter altogether.

So there it is. Four Great Events that, now I come to think of it, did not stand out as defining parts of 2007 at all. There were so many other small, magical Little Events that made all the difference in the world, but that is not why New Year Posts exist. A blog sometimes is so fulfilling. You can be incorrigibly random and get away with it, because no one knows your account password. I feel almost ready to take on a haircut now. No, make that a New Year.