When You Wake Up Feeling Old...

So I turned 34 today.

Sigh.

Let’s see, when they were my age Kurt Cobain had been dead for seven years, Jeff Buckley for three and Christopher Marlowe for five. F. Scott Fitzgerald had already published “This Side of Paradise” and “The Great Gatsby” while Hemmingway had completed “The Sun Also Rises” and “A Farewell To Arms”. Hell, Sheryl Crow had recorded “All I Wanna Do” and Joan Osborne had convinced everyone that “One of Us” was a good song. Makes me wonder what the hell I am doing with my life.

I have to admit that I have a rather ambivalent view towards my birthday. It’s just never been this big day of celebration for me. Part of that is due to the fact that an early September birthday is kind of sucky when you are a kid. Your birthday means that school is starting so you have nine months of learning new things accompanied by nine months of ridicule and insults because you happen to find learning new things interesting. That always put a damper on birthday celebrations and it still filters through to today. Of course now it is more of realizing that I am hundreds of miles away from my family and late at night I find myself wondering if I have more friends in Mexico City than Kansas City. So you can pretty much assume that I haven’t broken out the balloons and streamers tonight.

I know that it is weird and maudlin but this is the way I get on my birthday. I sit and look at my life and wonder what the hell am I doing here. I mean, my senior year of high school is now literally half a lifetime ago yet I still myself wondering about those days and having nightmares about not having finished a Physics assignment. College was more than a decade ago, I haven’t worked as an engineer for six years, yet I still can’t tell you where any of those years went. In “Kitchen Confidential” Anthony Bourdain wrote about his ice cream truck theory. The idea being if you happened to get run over by an ice cream truck what would your last thought be as the pleasant jingle rang in your ears. He wanted it to always be “I sure had a lot of fun”. I’ve been wondering a lot about what mine would be.

I’ve accomplished a lot in 34 years. I’ve collected a lot of pieces of paper that say I’m smart. I’ve made some great friends and hope that I’ve lived my life by my only rule, leave the world a better place than you found it. I have yet to force any company I’ve worked for into bankruptcy and have, on occasion, helped board members to large bonuses. I’ve built an eclectic and schizophrenic resume but one that looks mighty impressive. Whether any of this means anything is debatable. The fact that I haven’t exactly focused on maximizing my enjoyment in life really isn’t.

It’s strange, I was thinking the other day that there is very little I require in life. I’m not a heavy baggage / high maintenance type of guy. Give me some good books, some good music and halfway decent conversation and I’m good to go. If I could ever find a girl who liked me and could also tell me ten things I don’t already know I’d probably follow her to the ends of the earth. But what really drives me is the fact that there are things that I don’t know and haven’t learned. A friend of mine emailed me last week recommending that since I love music so much I should take voice lessons and learn to sing. I could add that to the list of things I want to accomplish except that there are two out there that I promised to do before turning 35. One is write my novel. The other is get married. I’ll get one of them done at least.

Before anyone starts getting really worried I still feel that I’m living a pretty awesome life. A year ago today I was on a plane flying to London for business and got to hang out drinking Guinness across from the British Museum. There are a lot of times I look at my life and wonder how I pulled all of this off. But there are a lot of things missing, too. And a few years ago I could just think “Don’t worry, I’ll do that later.” Now I’m in my mid-thirties. Later has basically arrived. And I really have no clue what my next step is going to be or what I have to do to turn my life into what I feel that it should be. Coming from a guy whose entire life has been built by knowing exactly what to do in every situation this is not a fun feeling.