Birthday Reflections

So I turned 35 today. I neglected to make any plans, and now I am suffering the consequences.

I am at the age where, not only do I care less about my birthdays, I also experience a nagging need to fact-check myself when I say how old I am. I have to think for a second when people ask my age.

Today has been kind of a shitty day, though not because I despise aging. If anything, age brings credibility. Not wisdom, but credibility. The older I get, the more I can bullshit people and get away with it. On the other hand, I lately find myself ruefully thinking, "I'm in my mid-thirties; I'm too old to think like that, too old for silly insecurities, too old for weakness."

Today started off on the wrong foot when, the first thing out the gate was disappointing news. The "Mittens" crowd had involved me in a Skype-based D&D 5e campaign, The Curse of Strahd. We started in June, and today the game was disbanded. All good things come to an end, and we knew it was only going to amount to a summer fling anyway, but it's better to end on a high note rather than drive it into the ground and have all the players irritated with each other in real life as a result of how sour things inevitably went, as with the Star Wars Saga Edition campaign I ran. Ugh. All good things come to a... bad end?

To be clear, I have absolutely no hard feelings about this, but it is very disappointing. For one thing, it was fun. But it was also my friends in Missouri. My only complaint/regret is that everyone disabled their cameras, so it was only audio feed. Basically a conference call with an interactive game board and chat window, Roll20.net. Um, you guys, when I was invited to join, I thought the point was to see each other while we interacted. But, oh well.

Instead, today we all typed out our secret backstories that had been harboring all the ways our fates were intertwined. It's like a book series was turned into a film franchise that flopped with the first entry, so you had to go to Wikipedia to find out what happened. Well, I guess it's not like that, because you could just read the books. Whatever. My point is, it was a day of plot revelations that would have been awesome to play out, but that's what happens when a group of people in their 30s try to do something together.

After that, Liam was being incredibly difficult, as he has been lately. I never complain on Facebook about my sixteen-month-old baby for a few reasons. Mainly because enough people bitch and moan about being parents, and they really don't need me to add to the litany of down sides. When I was single, I was inundated with complaining to the point where I was discouraged from having kids at all, and then the same people responsible for that feeling would be shocked and even condescending when I would say so. Now that I'm there, I see that being a dad is great... "but..." I think a lot of people mean well, they simply lose track of just how much venting they actually end up doing. Venting helps the venter, but not the childless people reading it. Also, I don't want to bolster that anti-child sentiment by self-righteous people who think they are smarter because they opted to be DINKs (Dual Income No Kids). Hey, to each his own. Again, there's enough of that to go around, so I don't want to add to it.

But. Sometimes I want a consolation prize. Today is one of those times. It just sucks that it happens to also be my birthday.

Then I had a piano lesson at 1:00, which I don't usually do on Tuesdays. It was a make-up lesson that I myself scheduled, so I can't complain (wait, I can always complain), because I could have rescheduled, but I thought, "Eh, screw it. I have errands to do in that part of town anyway."

The lesson was awful. This kid was having one of his bad days. But it happens. Again, however, it just sucks that it happens to also be my birthday.

By the time I got home, it was 4:30 and Liam was being a difficult little boy, only by now his mommy was tired of dealing with him all by herself.

It was then that I finally realized how much I wish I had gotten a babysitter for today.

What I wanted to do more than anything was get one, two, or more friends together and go to The Brass Tap. The mocha IPA is even better than it sounds. I love the vibe of that bar, but I am always on the outside looking in. Sometimes literally.

Jason Bourne comes out in a week and a half. I am going to make an event out of it. And an event blog post. It's more than just a movie: it's an opportunity to reclaim a lost piece of myself from back when Matt Damon last graced the screen as the titular character. I will explain that in due course, but let it suffice to say that I am still steadily in the shuffling of modes

I had a point that was going to connect this to the D&D thing. I forgot it. That's because Liam stirred from his nap as I was typing. Go figure / case in point.

Now that it is 8:00 PM and I have done nothing "special" for my birthday, I decided to cut my losses. I brewed some coffee, put my headphones on and my old "coffee shop quintessential sanctuary" playlist on iTunes, and I am doing some serious navel-gazing. Taking stock of my past, all the myriad chapters, and above all, the many different defining points of my timeline where I had distinct and clear goals for that time. Looking back on how many things went unfulfilled, goals unmet, and hopes abandoned altogether, and what it all means.

Thinking: What defines me?

I can't believe I went so long without a blog post, but really not much has changed: I am still recovering from the stress of the cancer scare. And I am still putting my life story on "Shuffle Mode," in terms of both deliberate, ritualized nostalgia and resolving unfinished business.

It's going too slowly. And today was a bad day.

The past few birthdays, I've had the same thought: "I'm too old to expect anything. No one is entitled to a happy birthday, and once you hit thirty you're not allowed to make it about yourself." But today I thought of a counterpoint to that: "I may be too old to play the birthday card to get nice treatment, but the flip side is that I am a working American, a paying customer. I can do what i want when I decide to do it, any day of the year." I could have gone out, but I didn't have anyone to go with. I still could have gone out. But I elected to listen to iTunes and mourn the past.

We recently watched The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, rounding off our trilogy "marathon." It was supposed to be a marathon. In January. It took us seven months to find the time to watch three movies. Anyway, I found myself savoring the lighting of the films, just thinking about how the setting sun hits the rocks and snow, the colors, and how I could practically smell the air of the colder weather. I realized just how much I have relied on Howard Shore's music from the other trilogy to salve the wounds throughout real life, how much I used the connecting stories as allegorical inspiration, how much I have used the music to help my soul along the way. Film music has long been an intrinsic aspect of my own way of facing the day, walking through life with a depth of feeling and meaning that would otherwise be stunted. And Howard Shore's contribution is indelible and indispensable.

I was going somewhere with that, but Liam woke up crying again. Maybe that itself is a fitting end to this introspection.

I find myself profoundly unhappy with my life.