Suddenly we are all looking around thinking, "What have we done this year?" And coming up with not much. There are less than two months to go this year, and we are all stunned that progress has not occurred. Shouldn't we be better off than we were at the beginning of the year? There was so much promise and hope and then -- what happened?

But the answer to what happened is being discarded for the panic of trying to fit an entire year into the last couple of months. It's like hunting every day of the season, finding yourself on the last day without blood on your hands and frantically trying to find a buck with a lame leg just to prove that you stood vigilant instead of screwing around.

Congress, in the last few days since the election, has found that they've been screwing around. They haven't passed much of anything this year. They haven't fixed anything. And we keep getting these messages from the Terrorist Crisis Center (or wherever it is we get these warnings) that al Qaeda is going to have a coordinated attack somewhere, somehow and with something really horrible. Which makes me, of course, really scared.

Did anyone dress up as an al Qaeda member for Halloween? I think it would have been cool to see a drunk Spider-man swinging at an even more drunk Osama bin Laden. And their girlfriends (dressed as Mary Jane and I Dream of Genie respectively) frantically trying to get them to stop, screaming that Spider-man wasn't really touching Genie's ass.

We've got less than two months to fix this? Somehow I think a bit of this will have to spill over into next year.

The Lame Duck session in Congress has begun, and there are great expectations. Or something like that. Usually they'd just stay out of D.C. for the next few months and gather up again after the new year. But since they've been screwing around, the Prez is making them come back and pass everything they wouldn't pass before the elections.

This from a President who has been campaigning or on vacation for more than half of his term.

But it's not just politics feeling the heat from the approach of the new year.

Back in late August, as the year turned its face toward fall, some friends and I (all of us single) made a pact to try and find girlfriends before Thanksgiving. Unless something spectacular and unprecedented happens in the next couple of weeks, no one is going to win. We've been screwing around. We're never gonna get the Girlfriend Appreciation bill passed before the new year. There really is no support for it and neither side can agree on key issues.

I've been having a hard time keeping my eye on the prize. There have been many distractions from the end goal. And maybe I haven't been looking in the right places, because likely candidates have not been plenty. Also, there was about a month or so when I really didn't want to try. This really cut down on my productivity in this area. Not that this is a good excuse, but I don't fault the people who threw me off their Fantasy Dating Team. I was not producing points on a consistent basis. I was dead weight.

And now another day has gone by just explaining all the ins and outs of this process. I think near the end of the year, because the daylight times are shorter, the availability of time becomes slimmer as well. So the last two months are actually shorter than the middle couple of months (June and July are extremely long -- there is at least an extra month of sunlight during that time), and we all start running downhill toward the end of the year.

The holiday time makes the time available shorter. Rush rushing to find enough food for the big dinners. Rush rushing to find the right gifts for people you haven't talked to enough during the year. And somehow that five day weekend feels like a quick two-hitter.

Suddenly, tomorrow is the last day of the year. New Year's Eve. And all of tomorrow's parties have been planned and stocked. We all know the houses and bars that will be our final resting places for the end of the year. We lay all the drugs out on the table and choose our state of mind for the big change (E for you, M for me, the little black ones we'll give to the cute girls). And it's suddenly over.

We have wasted another year waiting for something to happen. But luckily, when the clock goes around for the last time this year, it only presents greater opportunity. There are suddenly twelve whole months to get the stuff done we couldn't get to last year.

And it won't be until after Halloween 2003, when the makeup gets washed off and you're looking in the mirror thinking, wasn't I Osama bin Laden last year? Didn't I get into a fight with Spider-man last year -- or was it Frodo? I really need to get on the ball. I need to stop screwing around.

Matt Worley can procrastinate like nobody's business.