So, I turn 33 in about an hour and as always, I don’t take birthdays very well. I know other people are big on celebrating birthdays and getting completely drunk in honor of their birth. I’ve never really fallen into that category. I always blame it on having my birthday on Labor Day weekend, when most people are trying to get away from things. Plus, it’s the start of the school year and it’s tough to really look forward to your birthday when you know that it means school will have started. Not that I didn’t like school, more like I really enjoyed learning but didn’t enjoy the atmosphere and culture that accompanied it. And drinking really shouldn’t be tied to the calendar. It is much too limiting.
Still, I am struggling tonight to come to grips with this birthday, as I now enter the Grant Hill year of my life. In a way, this one is tougher for me than turning 30. When I was 30 I was new in town and new in the job and so much of the previous year had been a blur that while it was momentous, I still felt like I was well in control of my own destiny. But at 33 I’m really beginning to feel old. It’s like I might very soon start saying things like “The thing is, when Mozart was my age he’d been dead for five years.”
I’ve already started to try things to hide my age. I’ve learned what details to leave out of my stories to make it much tougher to figure out just how I old I am. It worked well last night as this girl Angela guessed that I was 26 or 27 and was surprised when I admitted my age. She said I had young eyes, which is a nice complement. Still, no matter how hard I tried I did have to admit that I had a decade on this girl and even though she was super cool and we talked about DNA sequencing at one in the morning I knew that there was no way I was going to overcome that age difference. Especially not in this town.
(We did literally discuss the complexities of DNA sequencing and before anyone complains, it was her choice of conversation topics. I’m not sure if I’ve ever had that conversation at a bar before. Definitely not with anyone that cute.)
What’s really bothering me is that I live my life on a five year plan and my two big goals that I had down to accomplish before I was 35 haven’t been completed and seem really far away. Those two goals are, of course, to write a novel and to get married. What would surprise most people is that I consider writing a novel to be the easy one of the two to accomplish. That just takes time and effort and dedication, all of which I have. I just don’t know if I have the courage to sit down and put all of that onto paper and have it not match my expectations.
And marriage, well, I’ve always said that it was a goal but not a requirement. It’s not like on this day in 2008 I’ll be in Vegas just trying to grab some random woman to marry me before midnight. At least, that is not the current plan. But it is something that I want more and more, to settle down and get married and raise a family and move on to that portion of my life. And the thing is, I don’t know if or when or how any of that is going to happen. That’s tough for me since I am someone who thinks that he can logically predict every scenario and build a gameplan that guarantees success and that just doesn’t work in real life. At least with the novel I can just tell myself to sit down at the laptop and write, on this one I’m not quite sure what it would mean to work harder.
The other thing that has been on my mind is whether or not I am truly leading a life worth living. By all of the typical measures I have accomplished a lot of things but I’ve never judged myself based on what type of car I drive or what clothes I wear or where I go on vacation. They all seem so trivial to me. Success is how I feel in my soul, whether or not I end the day by being able to say that I’ve made a difference in the world. And that question (along with its cousin of whether or not I am truly a good person) has been keeping me up at night.
(Before people get too concerned, I still feel unbelievably blessed about my life. I have family and friends who support me through everything and I have had so many incredible experiences that I can’t imagine that the seven year old version of EC would have ever thought he would get to do them all. So, it’s not like I’m about to turn off all the lights in my apartment and listen to Cure CDs for the next six hours. But I am at the point in my life where I really need to figure out what it all means and I can’t blot out the world with Playstation games for much longer.)
Because of this, and a couple of other real life issues, it looks like I’ll be taking the rest of this week off from writing in the blog. I’ll come back to it next week though one of the big things I need to figure out is just what I want to do with the blog. I am serious about the novel, it is something that I just need to do, but I have to figure out how I can do that writing, and the blog, and do my real job and have a life all at the same time. That’s not the easiest thing from a time management standpoint, especially when I have a very limited amount of natural creativity. So, I need a week to think and refresh the batteries a little. My hope is that I can increase the quality of the blog, which has been lagging a lot recently. See you all in a week.
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