HOW time flies. Parang kailan lang. These are the usual comments for each new year and birthday as the young ones look forward to the future, and the young once look back to the past and wonder which way to go now after all the trials and errors, the hits and misses, the rights and wrongs.

With that vast past behind them, there will come a time when the young once will end up not trusting anyone.

Aside from the absence or presence of loose skin, wrinkles, and white hair, another way to tell if a person belongs to the young ones or the young once is through the way they deal with hangovers. The young ones can drink the night away, have a sleepless night, and still report for work on time. The young once may have to take at least three days off work after a morning-the-night with tequila.

For Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve, even the young ones in the family had champagne only. Or sparkling wine since the family’s favorite drink is made in Piedmont, Italy and not in the Champagne Region of France. When we were the young ones, we had mixed drinks: tequila, vodka, red wine, and champagne, with beer as “washer.” And then, we crawled to our beds by sunrise.

For the gym rats, though, both young and old, there’s no rest for the weary as they went to the gym on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, New Year’s Eve, and New Year’s Day. Which makes me a non-gym rat yet—I was absent from the gym on Christmas Day and New Year’s Day.

Christmas parties are so over now unless your group decided to avoid the holiday rush and will celebrate this month or on Valentine’s Day or even on Chinese New Year. There’s no deadline for Christmas parties but celebrating on Easter Sunday is stretching it to the max. And an Easter egg hunt instead of parlor games means zero chance of reaching Jerusalem through Trip to Jerusalem.

The Chinese New Year will be on February 17.

Seventeen — my favorite number. So, here’s hoping 2026 as the Year of the Horse will become my favorite.

And it’s the Year of the Red Horse. No, not the drink. But that’s one more reason to drink Red Horse.

I’m a dragon, by the way. That’s why I love Mushu, the dragon in “Mulan” where, after being mistaken for a little grasshopper, he says, “Dragon. Dra-gon. Not a cricket. I don’t do chores.”

I do chores, though, except cooking. I did buy Ronnie Fein’s “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Cooking Basics” on Sept. 1, 1998. 28 years later, it remains unread, a victim of tsundoku: buying books and not reading them.

And I’m sure it was on Sept. 1, 1998. I write the date of purchase on each book’s title page.

I’ve stopped buying books since I still have several boxes of books to reread as part of my spring cleaning a la Marie Kondo, wishing to keep only the items that spark joy.

This spring cleaning began during the pandemic lockdowns in 2020. Yes, time flies, but the spring cleaning crawls like a drunken New Year’s Eve reveler. Hic.