29 Years and 100 Posts

Happy Birthday

Well, it’s a cou­ple of days since my birth­day, so I thought I might cre­ate a spe­cial post to reflect upon it. Sure it’s a lit­tle late, but since plen­ty of peo­ple I know have been kind of shot­gun­ning birth­day well-wish­es around the date for the past month, I’m real­ly don’t feel bad about it. Not that I’ve mind­ed. Hav­ing cards, calls, and e‑mails sent for the past month has been kind of nice.

As the twen­ties slow­ly eek out of me, I find it inter­est­ing that I sim­ply do not feel old. I hear so many peo­ple around my age com­plain­ing about how they are start­ing to get old now and how their lives have changed. Well, of course my life has changed, but none of that makes me feel any older.

When­ev­er I lis­ten to a sto­ry from a friend or co-work­er about their chil­dren (pos­si­bly some wacky sit­u­a­tion the child got into just some­thing they said), I almost always empathize with the kid rather than the par­ent. I always find myself say­ing some­thing like “wow, I can remem­ber doing or say­ing the same thing when I was that age!” Fur­ther, while the guy in the mir­ror looks a bit old­er than some of the pic­tures on my desk, he hard­ly looks like a dif­fer­ent per­son. Maybe it’s because I rou­tine­ly am look­ing for new things; new chal­lenges or things to learn that make me feel, if not young, at least inex­pe­ri­enced (which is like being young, only dumb­er). Per­haps it is because I’m just now reach­ing the point in my life where I real­ly feel like I’m doing thing I want to do. The path isn’t being laid out before me by oth­ers any­more (except the to-do lists Angela leaves for me, which are okay).

What­ev­er the rea­son, I’ve yet to have many moments which have struck me that per­haps I am get­ting old­er, at least faster than I had thought I would. The most recent that may fall into this cat­e­go­ry hap­pened one night last week. Angela had asked me to come down to her phar­ma­cy after work to help with some stock­ing and to stop at the gro­cery store on the way for some soda. I went to the Kroger at about 10:00 only to learn they closed at 9:00. In over two years of liv­ing in this house, nei­ther of us had attempt­ed to go to the gro­cery store past 9:00 pm. This from the guy who in col­lege always shopped past mid­night to avoid the crowds! That did sort of make me real­ize I’m at least not try­ing to act like a col­lege stu­dent any­more. If not old, maybe just more sensible.

super_structure: mile_stone

This is, by the way, the 100th post to this site since it has become a blog. Yes, it’s been a quick 9–1/2 months (no, seri­ous­ly, that’s how long it’s been) since my very first post, and lot’s has hap­pened to talk about. There’s also been a lot of chaff, but hey, it’s a blog. It can’t all be Don Quixote all the time. There’s also been some changes in the blog soft­ware: I start­ed over with a Blog­ger account until Jason J. con­vinced me to try Word­Press. I’ve learned some about CSS and PHP (okay, no jokes, I said some), with still much thanks to Mr. J. Fur­ther, I’ve got­ten more into dig­i­tal pho­tog­ra­phy and also acquired a some­what unhealthy obses­sion with Flickr, which has hope­ful­ly helped to influ­ence some of my friends.

Any­way, as this is kind of the record of my life and the world through my lens, I’m look­ing for­ward to much more con­tent on here in the future. To all my friends, fam­i­ly, and com­plete inter­net strangers who have found any­thing on here worth read­ing, thanks for stop­ping by. I tru­ly enjoy this method of com­mu­ni­cat­ing with the world and have love hav­ing peo­ple talk back to me here: friends and strangers alike. It helps me think about who I am and who I want to be and pos­si­bly who you see me as.