There’s not much that’s especially awesome about this time of year. There’s maybe a warm day that offers a slight promise of spring, but that’s sort of like a stripper for me. It seems nice at the time, but it’s all really just a tease, and I usually get far too excited only to end up with some sort of head cold afterward. I’ll admit, I’m really excited about Feb. 14 this year, not because of Valentine’s Day, but because that’s the day pitchers and catchers report for Spring Training. Usually, I get excited about Chinese New Year, but even that doesn’t seem to offer much promise this time around.

Most years, my friend Eddie is in town. He’s Chinese, and I usually get some pretty damn good food out of the deal. He left town the day before New Year’s this time, so there wasn’t even really much reason to tank up for the holiday. It’s tough to drink a crapload of rice wine if you don’t have a pot-sticker-and-crab-rangoon base in your stomach. Honestly, the day pretty much passed me by. I felt sort of bad about this, so I decided to learn more about this particular year. It sounds like it would have been more fun just to eat and drink a lot.

It doesn’t really suck you in right off the bat because it’s the year of the rat. I mean, I shouldn’t make rash judgments, but geez Louise, a freaking rat? Maybe they just have a bad reputation, but do rats really do us humans any damn good at all? I suppose they’re fine to have in a lab to do creepy experiments on them, but otherwise, they’re just little balls of disease with legs that enable them to spread their contaminants. The rat falls just short of being worse than the year of the turd.

I should point out that any sort of “research” from here on out shouldn’t be taken as the gospel truth or anything. It’s mostly just a few little tidbits I ran across that may or may not be accurate. Since I’ve recently been informed that many people read this column only when extremely intoxicated or while taking a crap, that sort of “research” seems to be more than adequate. You get what you pay for and all that, and since this paper is free ... well, you do the math.

If you don’t know much about Chinese fortunes and such, it’s all sort of based on the different elements that make up our planet: gold, wood, fire, water and earth. Yeah, it doesn’t sound very scientific to me either, but what the piss, it’s probably as good an indicator as anything else you could use. This year, the earth is supposedly sitting on water. Basically, it looks stable, but underneath, it’s really pretty flimsy. Man, I don’t know, that sounds about right ... except the top part doesn’t seem all that stable anymore either. Let’s just say there will probably be a lot of underlying tensions.

The last time there was a year of the rat, 1996, there were 20 plane crashes. It makes sense. Rats apparently don’t fly and wish those who do ill will. Sure, it sucks if your plane goes down, but it makes the rest of us breathe a little easier knowing that rats cannot get airborne. A comfort such as this seems like a perfectly good reason to thin the herd of a few frequent flyers.

The Chinese calendar also follows a 60-year cycle, so 2008 should be historically similar to 1948. That was the year Israel was established, and the Berlin Wall started going up. It was also the year Babe Ruth died, so you might wanna put up the Yankees gear until 2009. Gandhi was assassinated. It was also the last time Cleveland won the World Series, which for some reason, gives me no comfort whatsoever about the impending year.

Anyway, the rat isn’t all bad. It’s the first of the signs, so it marks a new beginning. I’m not sure I’ve ever been especially optimistic about the future when a fucking rat ran in front of me, but apparently the Chinese look at things a little differently. The new beginning thing makes sense, though, since we’ll have a new leader here in the United States. The rodent is also seen as a “flower of romance,” meaning it could stimulate some sexual matters. Once again, hard to be particularly sexy with a freaking rat running all over the damn place, but whatever.

So, that’s all I got. We’re stuck with the year of the rat. The whole damn year is just getting started, and it already makes me feel a little apprehensive. Nobody likes rats much, and there’s probably reason to believe not many will like the upcoming year much either. All the other years sound kind of cool: ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, goat, monkey, rooster, dog and pig. At least I could find some good in all those animals. Monkeys are funny, tigers are scary, oxen are strong, horses are fun to ride, goats are responsible for some pretty good cheese. The rat though? The rat’s nothing but a dirty damn rodent. It might be a good time to hunker down and pretend this sort of thing doesn’t really make much sense to begin with.