birthday

Thirty

The past year, especially the past six months, have revealed sides of me I didn't necessary want to know about. A slightly fuller range of emotions and a slightly fuller range of experiences up until today, which marks the end of one decade and the start of another. My girlfriend and I will celebrate it quietly by re-watching episodes of a certain science fiction TV thriller she has yet to catch up on.

In the past year of reflection I haven't come up with anything resembling a 5-year plan. Instead of retirement objectives, I've a better sense of who I am. Instead of setting big goals for the rest of my life, I made small changes. Small changes like acknowledging that biking to work is the form of exercise that gives me the most satisfaction, helping solve two problems--weight stagnation and mental sluggishness--that irk more than plague. It's not social like basketball (my true love) or dragon boating or floorball. It gets me somewhere, up and down hills and past soccer pitches and baseball fields and cars and, more dishearteningly, other cyclists whizzing by. No longer do I type two spaces after a sentence. I don't buy fancy coffee anymore, partaking only when it's free and only often enough, not too often. Ice cream only consumed outside the house, that is, no containers of it allowed in the freezer anymore. A smarter routine at work, finding its way into my personal life (why is it hardly ever the other way around?), which means less social media during the day. It works out: I'm looking forward to the era of social media divestiture anyway.

Today, when other thirtysomethings welcomed me to the club, I joked that now I have to spend the next 30 years undoing the damaged caused by the first 30 years. That's a joke at my own expense, among the many bad habits not yet discarded, and really, my life up until this point has been easier than I'd like to admit. If daily urgency at work, as opposed to the weekly urgency of months past, is an unwelcome if necessary change, then I need to assert my right to relaxation to ease the belly stress. More swimming in the pool, going out less, working out with a physical destination rather than a number on a scale in mind, and more Sunday brunches on Commercial Drive are included in the self-prescribed remedy.

It doesn't feel like thirty, yet. Maybe, as one person already suggested today, I just need practice.

29

Today I enter the final year of my twenties, turning 29 years of age. The last few weeks I've been reflecting on how to get my shit together, and the prospect seems overwhelming. Money currently ain't a thang, but I have no plan for 5, 10, 20 years from now. My hobbies revolve solely around a computer, and the only thing I know how to cook is spaghetti. I lead a disorganized life in a small apartment, something I feel condemned to continue. Other issues nettle, like health (much improved due to floorball and dragon boat) and sleep schedule (closely related to my so-called diet), so over the coming weeks and months I'm doing a complete assessment of my life as I live it presently and coming up with at least the outlines of the next 30 years.

Where do I want to be? What do I want to do? What should I do? Whom do I want to spend my time with? What's that goddamn beeping noise? These questions and more I'll be asking myself. And my friends, annoying them surely. Some of them have it together in my view, so I'm not about to let this social network I've developed over the years go to waste. But first lunch (you guessed it, left-over spaghetti), then off to buy a new notebook to make it seem like I'm starting over. Because that's what it feels like.

Dries and Karlijn bake cookies for Drupal's sixth birthday
They hack a cookie cutter in the process.

28 on the 28th

Today I celebrate the end of my 28th year and the beginning of my 29th. This is the only time that the day of the month will match my age. Remember last year, when I said by this time I'd try to lost 28 pounds? Didn't quite work out that way. Still about the same, but not feeling as good about things. I need a better relationship with food, which is just a fancy way of saying I need to eat better and exercise smarter.

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I do like the attention of birthdays, but have come to think that they're pretty selfish, when one thinks about it. Sure, it's a day of the year where it's okay to be selfish, and that's fine, but the day celebrates something you, as the birthdayee, didn't really have anything to do with. This is really the anniversary my mom became a mother (for the second time) and my father became a birth-father for the first time and my sister became my sister. My brother gets to celebrate his becoming a brother too, though he was born about 2 years after me.

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The last week has seen me go to Courtenay for my high school reunion. I saw some old friends and they told me their story. The one that stayed on my mind, still, was that of Bill, the point guard and captain of the basketball team on which I was a forward. He and I attended basketball camps together, and were often roommates in hotels when we went to tournaments. A long-time mountain biker, he broke his back a year or so ago, and came to the reunion in a wheelchair, a permanent condition. He wouldn't let me feel sorry for him, though, and he was the Bill I remember all those years back, a smart, tough as nails loudmouth but not an asshole.

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I took my lovely girlfriend to see my hometown, and drove her around the valley, which made me feel like a big man. I must have got sunstroke or something on the way back to Vancouver, though, putting a damper on some of our later plans for the rest of the week, including missing the fireworks on Wednesday. Another sad departure at the airport, with at least two more such departures before the end of the year, and more after that. But I knew what I was getting into, and I have no regrets.

28 By 28

Today is my birthday, turning 27 years old. Starting today—or rather when I get back from a conference, to maximize the bang for the buck when I buy the membership—I'll be heading to the gym at least twice a week to get some exercise, which will be a marked increase from the no exercise during the last 6 months or so. It feels like an admission of defeat, because of my distaste for what a friend calls "gym culture" and that they have that evil worse than Satan himself, cable TV. Also, I need to cut down on the junk, meaning ice cream and so-called fast food. Can anybody hazard a guess what the amount of planning around this I've done other than that?

My new motto is "28 by 28", which stands for losing 28 pounds by the time I turn 28 years old. That feels like a modest goal, though I will measure success more based on my energy and esteem at the end of the term compared to its start than what the cheap scale I bought a couple of weeks ago tells me.

Birthday

Birthdays have always struck me as strange. Okay, replace "always" with "recently", and you'll get a more accurate version of my feelings towards them. Mine never really mattered that much, partly because my birthday always fell on a day in the middle of summer (meaning no, or at least few, school chums to celebrate with), and being a shy kid—and less-shy adult—meant that I didn't always appreciate unsolicited attention, not to mention finding it difficult to muster the energy to solicit attention. I've had a few friends, from different circles, call attention both to the fact that their birthday was coming up and that they (they!) were organizing a birthday get-together for themselves. Birthdays just seem to arbitrary and random (though after birth, recurring yearly) events, and too "just another day" to be a reason to celebrate. And besides, the people's whose birthdays they are had very little to do with their actual birth. It's a little surprising that people are more interested in celebrating their own birth when most of the work were done by the mother (and less so, but still significantly, the father). If anything, gifts should be showered on the parents, not the child, every anniversary of their children's birth. Then we could safely abolish Mothers' and Fathers' Days, since how fair is that parents with more children only get one day to celebrate?

Hypocritically, then, I'm announcing that today is my 26th birthday. It still feels like I'm 22 or thereabouts, but that probably has more to do with my belief that I'm starting out career-wise, 4 years after "normal" university graduates start. Then again, I graduated from university at 24, so really, I'm only 2 years late. That might be my way of telling off those in their mid-twenties who say stupid things like "I feel so old" when really they're just starting at what are going to be the most exciting, nervous, fun, stressful times of their lives. Most people in their mid-twenties have 50 years of life left, and I wonder how people in their 70s would react if they heard somebody a half-century younger effectively saying that they feel their life is over.

Even more hypocritically, my wishlist has just been updated to better reflect the fact that I still do not have a DVD player and that my taste in music is hip (but not overly so).

I have no plans to celebrate my birthday, since I've already had a nice little party with my family a couple weeks ago and a "surprise" party yesterday at work. Work dominates the rest of the week, even though for much of it the benefit will be more social than financial. I usually feel better off that my 'real life' friends don't know or forget about my birthday, because I'd rather hang out with them for the sake of hanging out with them than because more than two decades ago I happened to be born.

Highlights

Highlights of this, my 25th birthday:

  • Swimming in my apartment complex's pool with my mom and nephew.
  • Eating KFC and cake with mom, nephew and sister.
  • My present: a dinner table, despite lack of space for said table. (Actually, it's cool because it means no more eating on the floor—uh, I mean, at my desk. Yes, that'll do.)
  • Working (actually, that part sucked, but they did have Nanaimo Bars for me, so it balances out).
  • The fact that only my family and co-workers knew it was my birthday.
  • Getting a girl's number.