How do you measure, measure a year?

When the cast of Rent sings about measuring a year in love, it’s endearing and heart warming. What better way to reflect upon a year than by recounting all the ways you've given and received and shared love?

When your aunt measures a year in love, namely, whether or not in the last year you've found a person to love you, or at least a person who likes you enough to attend a family function with you, it is less heart warming and more gut checking.

Easter 2009 my aunt declared, for whose benefit I'm still not sure, that the next year was going to be ‘my year.’ Between Easter 2009 and Easter 2010, I was going to meet someone. Until she mentioned it, I didn’t even realize I was in need of ‘a year,’ a year especially different from the previous year(s) I’d had. I was just coasting along thinking that it was perfectly normal to attend Easter parties solo and eat a two-person helping of ham. From a food service perspective, it was like I had a partner.

When Ash Wednesday rolled around this year and other people were thoughtfully considering what to give up during Lent, I was thinking, "Shit, I only have 40 days left in ‘my year.’ Three-hundred and twenty-five days wasted and all I had left was a forty day sprint.

It would be fitting to say that the remaining forty days were a time of fasting and false temptation and that at the end of them, I was delivered from singledom, a perfectly boyfriendable boy coming to my rescue like angels coming down from heaven.

Instead, the remaining forty days passed liked the preceding 325, and to be quite honest, like all the days in all the years preceding ‘my year.’ At the family Easter party I ate a double helping of ham and had an Easter Egg hunt with my two-year-old cousin. If I measure ‘my year’ by my aunt’s standard, it was probably a failure; if I measure it by the cast of Rent’s standard, it was an overall success; if I measure it by my own standard: ham consumption and successful Easter Egg hunts, it was the best year on record.