GOOD SUNRISES remind me of melted Popsicles, pink and liquid and sweet. The sunsets that bathe my office at 4:30 in the afternoon have nothing sweet about them. I'm too far from a window to watch the light disappear over and into New Jersey, but I can sense the malevolent rippling of the deadbeat winter sun from the splashes of red on our blue and green walls.

The 18th floor of a Manhattan office building does not offer that much of a godlike point of view. Sunsets, fireworks, lightning storms mostly disappear behind taller neighbors.

But every 20 minutes, the Workrave program on my computer attempts to keep me from getting eyestrain or Repetitive Stress Injury, and reminds me to look at least 20 feet away for 30

seconds.

So I stare west into New Jersey or down into the Garment District — sorry, Fashion District. After a year in New York, I've seen no accidents or muggings. Nor have I seen a single intersection as breathtaking to watch from above as Fourth and Market in San Francisco. Stockton and Ellis feed into Fourth by crossing Market, and a car on Stockton doesn't clearly see the end of the intersection until it has rounded the corner past the Virgin Megastore. Watching it during the day is amusing; watching it at night is scary.

When the sun's out I feel connected to the cars and pedestrians below, like we're all in it together. When it's dark, I feel like we're all on our own, guarding our sparks of heat and light against the cold.

The perspective the 18th floor lends me feels useless and exaggerated. This is also how I feel about New Year's. All the unique changes get telescoped into a number — 2007 — that means nothing without context. That big switch that happens at midnight feels more disorienting to me than the sum of 365 small changes it signifies.

And maybe it's the relentless forward progression of that number — the year — that bothers me. Everything on the familiar scale is cyclical. Monday will come around again. The moon forever plays at being coy. The sun will start paying its court-ordered support and try to spend more time with the kids before losing it and taking off again.

But the year is like entropy, ever increasing, and the calendars have a fixed beginning and a fixed (though unknown) end.

I don't want the numbers to change. Or I want a round calendar, like a clock, with year numbers on it for a baseline. An analog clock tells you more than just the time.

It tells you the other possible times, and that they will all come around again. The year is like a digital clock, displaying meaningless lines in an arbitrary formation, with no notion of the past and no hint of the future.

I recently read about the theme of linear vs. cyclical time in Western art. Evidently a lot of old paintings feature "Christ Chronocrator." Regular ol' humans used to think everything just repeated itself, but the Christian mes-sage says we're on a one-way road to judgment. The art shows stuff like Christ wrenching time from a zodiac.

I'm reading up on symbolism in Western art because I can't appreciate old paintings at all. My husband likes going to museums and looking at art, and I end up finding a bench and taking a nap.

So little information is conveyed in those old works unless you know some history and the visual language of art. Paintings, like movies, are intellectual, visual and emotional experiences, and I'm incredibly deficient in the emotional and visual sensibilities.

So I'm trying to bone up on the intellectual aspect of art so I don't get bored to tears looking at the Old Masters, and while I'm staring at them maybe some empathy and aesthetics will take pity on me.

So that's how I'm fighting off the decay of the universe: by learning how to see it through lots of different lenses, by growing instead of just dying. Every year I advance towards inexorable death, I want to increase how much time will regret killing me off.

And I want to find words for sunsets and better words for sunrises. You deserve better than "melted

Popsicles."

Sumana Harihareswara writes for Bay Area Living each week. You can write to her at sumana@crummy.com.

All the unique changes of New Year's get telescoped into a number — 2007 — that means nothing without context. That big switch that happens at midnight feels more disorienting to me than the sum of 365 small changes it signifies. And maybe it's the relentless forward progression of that number — the year — that bothers me.