Like Popeye, I yam what I yam, and ain't nothing I can do about it

Today I am trying to decide if I want to do any work whatsoever. I’ve sold two stories this week, and that’s pretty good, and I have a business appointment later in the afternoon concerning website material I’ve written for a local business, so I think I’m kind of caught up.

And, anyway, it’s my birthday. No, please, no fanfare; no to-do. Just simple greetings and warm wishes will suffice.

Anyway, birthdays are weird things. In fact I am only one day older than I was yesterday, not a year older, so why do we make such a fuss about them? Yet we persist in doing so. Really, the birthday should only be significant to the person impacted, since it is the one day of the year that he or she can actually claim as his or her own. Well, their own along with all the other people who share that birthday.

I was thinking about birthdays in a general sense, however. When we are very young we long for our birthdays. We are impatient about them. We always want to be older so we tell people we are five-and-a-half, not a mere infant of five. Or, maybe ‘going-on-six.’ That sounds even more impressive. When you’re very young you can’t offer much to impress people, so your age will have to do.

This fascination and obsession with ones age continues into the teen years because by certain ages you can do certain things that had formerly been denied, like drive a car legally, drink alcohol in a bar legally, vote, and join-up and risk being blown to ratshit in Afghanistan or Iraq. And, ultimately you can pass that magic bar that suggests you are finally a ‘grown-up.’ This is only a legal status, however. At an emotional and behavioural level, however, some people never pass that mark.

For me, I stopped being enchanted by my age when I was around 30. Actually, that was a pivotal birthday for me in the sense that I didn’t like it at all. My twenties were over and somehow I felt I had missed out on grabbing the magic ring on the carousel ride. I hadn’t made it by 30. And, nobody over 30 could be trusted, went the wisdom of the day. After that I tried to stop paying attention to my age, mainly because I liked it less and less each year.

I haven’t reached the point of lying about my age, or of subtracting years. I haven't truly entered the realm of curmudgeonly geezerdom yet, I don't think. Still have all my own hair and some of my teeth and am still most positively impacted by my wife's pretty face (and other stuff.) On the other hand, I no longer tell people my age. I want my creds to still have impact professionally and personally, and don’t want to be reduced to the realm of ‘old fartdom’ by somebody who just stopped peeing the bed two years earlier.

Anyway, there is solace. Winston Churchill didn’t even become Prime Minister of England until he was 68, and Ronald Reagan was well over 100 when he became president.