My wrist aches. The left one. It starts in my wrist but doesn't seem to end until well into my shoulder. Isn't there something about left arm aches and heart attacks? That would make for a bad day. It's probably just the rain. It's as gray as can be without resorting to fog.

This warm December is pointing straight at a soggy green Christmas. They're becoming routine around here. I'd like a crisp brand-new, just out of the package, Christmas. I'd like to wake up to a newly wrapped landscape on Christmas morning. Postcards, fairy tales, and Anne Murray songs.

It had better freeze up by new years. Ally and I will be heading up to Peterborough to a friends cottage. I was there last year, and the new years before that we were with the same group of people at a different cottage. Both trips involved day and night escapades on the frozen lakes nearby. It would be disappointing not to have frozen water to play on.

I don't acknowledge or get excited about the years passing by. I'm not sure why that is. It could be the party or the lack of a party. The pressure to get an invite to a good party and then close the deal by having yourself a great time. Those social cliched pressures drive me nuts so I try and refuse them, claim their insignificance.

New years is insignificant to me now, although that wasn't the case when I was young. I've spent a few recent new years celebrations asleep in bed but when I was a teenager the prospect of spending a new years at home was terrifying. It isn't the fact that you may miss a good party. The problem was the party assessments for months and years later. Sitting in the high school lunch room listening to the new years tales of bravado and conquest overlap each other, hoping the focus doesn't shift to my silence.

"Hey, what did you do new years?"

"Nothing, my new years sucked." hoping that was enough to satisfy the mob. Why do I hang around with these people? We sit here and yell at each other, allowing only the loudest message to be heard. Are we all training to be in politics? Is it necessary to endure years of painful conversations in order to learn what a decent one is, to learn how to listen to people in our lives?

Listening is a lost art. The best you can hope for is someone who'll shut up every now and then and let you talk. It's easy to mistake this for listening but they're only waiting for cues. They're listening passively for memory flags so that they can seize the conch.

You spend 20 minutes talking about your uncle who recently passed away. They look you in the eyes and listen until you mention his favourite red sweater that he was buried in.

"Oh, that's funny. His favourite sweater was red? My favourite shirt is red, well not really red, more mauve. I guess it's actually purple, ya, purple. Anywho, the funny part is that I bought it years ago for next to nothing and I hated it for the first year I had it. It looked like shit on me. It wasn't until....."

Within a minute or two you've lost track of your uncle and your point. Listening is the first rule of dating. As a guy, all you should do on a date is get the girl to talk about herself. It's the easiest thing in the world. Just ask questions about her. The hard part is that you have to actually listen. Do that and she'll have herself a grand time.

"So you're originally from Oakville?"

"Well, not really. I moved there when I was 12, just before high school. My dad was transferred to Toronto."

"Really? What does he do?"

"He works for some large printing operation, project management I think. He switched when I went to university to make more money or something."

"You went to university? Which one?"

"Guelph. I just really like the campus."

"What did you study there?"

"Well, I started in astrophysics, switched to chemistry during first year but I didn't like all the labs so I switched to engineering at the end of first year. That had tons of math in it, did you know engineering had lots of math?"

"No, really? Did you finish that?"

"Well no. I switched to physics but there's so much algebra in that. Anyways I ended up graduating in astrophysics."

"Sounds cool, what is that all about anyway?"

"I'm not really sure."