...'tis the season to commercialise the LEAP YEAR

It's a lucky Leap Year for ladies (image: wikipedia)

Have you organised your Leap Year Party? Of course with colourful party hats and a banner shouting ‘Happy Leap Year” across your lounge room wall! Oh.

You didn’t. That’s a shame.

Leap Years are highly underrated. February 29^thshould be encased in mystic and magic. It’s the day our planet realigns to the sun and seasons and ladies are allowed to propose by tradition. And we all know, technically speaking, that leap year babies age 4-times slower than normal human beings. What can we expect from a day that doesn’t really exist?

Primary school children can tell you how a Leap Year is calculated. It’s the solution to the extra .242 that’s left flying around time-space, waiting to be used up when the calendar allows it. And so, as 2012 is divisible by four and four hundred (as the Gregorian algorithm dictates), it’s time to celebrate another Leap Year. HAPPY LEAP YEAR!!!!!

With modernity knocking at our doors, and scientists trying to dispute Einstein’s theory, perhaps the Leap Year should be adapted to suit our self-indulging culture. What’s in it for us anyway?

Maybe the extra .242 should be based on a flexible accumulation theory. People can be free to choose when they take their Leap Year day.

“Boss?”

“Yeh?”

“I won’t be able to come in today. It’s my leap-year day”.

“Oh. Happy Leap Year then.”

“Thanks.”

And of course, you could accumulate your Leap Years over a lifetime. You could wait until you’ve accumulated enough Leap Years to take a week’s holiday. It would only take 20 years.

In failing to get government and business support, the very least we could do is commercialise it. Considering the commercial state of Christmas and Valentine’s Day, I’m surprised the Leap Year has been neglected. People don’t even throw ‘Leap Year Parties’.

Therefore, the following rules are in order:

• A Leap Year now equals the hype/status/importance of New Year – only four times as massive due to its rarity of occurrence. Someone get some fireworks!
• Start adopting stock celebratory phrases when identifying with a Leap Year. “Hip hip hooray, it’s a leap year day’, “ Happy loopy Leap Year!” or “Leap Leap hooray” would be appropriate.
• Any wishes made on Leap Year Day will come true (starting from…now). Just make a wish while holding one finger on a toad, licking bat’s blood, and jumping over a lazy dog. If it doesn’t come true, try again in four years.
• Get drunk. Really drunk.
• The traditional Leap Year’s dinner must involve takeaway that amounts to a week of calories.
• Gift giving is forbidden (as if we need another holiday forcing us to buy gifts) Instead, tell everybody what you don’t like about them.
• What happens on Leap Year, stays in Leap Year.

If you’re interested in Leap Year party decorations, I’m sell you some. I came prepared.

...death to DATING RULES

Should you call? Should you kiss on a first date? Should you put two kiss-crosses on a text message or just one?

Wait. Maybe you’re asking the wrong questions.

Should you even CARE?

If you like someone, why not just go for it? Scaredy-cat.

Dating is rife with unwritten rules. Rules that daters should abide by in order to be tagged as NORMAL. Like the three-day calling rule. It’s the devised number of days that perfectly expresses interest without obsession. More than three days translates to “you’re just not that interested”. Less = steer clear of the STALKER. But who devised the rules?

There’s no referee in dating. There’s no Dating Police either (unless you are, in fact, a stalker). We’re on our own. And we’re not used to living without laws – we’ve lived by hundreds of ‘em since the day we were born.

Perhaps society needed a guidebook to know how to deal with the opposite sex. So we created ‘norms’ that allow us to measure our dating actions, and understand the status of our new relationships.

But if there’s no better explanation (and please feel free to theorise), then why not break the rules?

I lived in a society where no dating rules existed. It was in Istanbul, Turkey, and I learnt all about it for six years. You could call five minutes after the date finished if you liked. You could ask someone’s age/job/salary as a pick-up line if you fancied. It was refreshing. And yes, some of them ended up as stalkers, but at least you didn’t have to wait three days to find out.

So maybe we should go ‘rule free’. It’ll work. Eventually. In the meantime, it’ll quickly sort out the potential keepers from the non-interested. Those who freak probably have issues they need to deal with first anyway.