Happy Birthday To Me

Happy Birthday To Me

I’m 32 today.

Something I do every year is try to take a look back at the past year and figure out just exactly where I stand with respect to last year–sort of an internal performance review. I do this because ultimately I need to know if I’m going somewhere in life, even though I might not know the ultimate destination.

I finally have mentally prepared myself to be a father. I’m not sure what happened, but it was similar to the Simpsons episode where Bart is playing miniature golf against Todd Flanders. “Tree falling in the woods, tree falling in the woods, aooough…” Basically, I realized that my mind was the one thing holding me back. Thinking too much about something can sometimes not make a situation better. Instead, it just leads to more unnecessary thoughts and fears.

I have enough fear in my life, thank you.

What I’ve learned:

• I’m not much for going and playing video games in an arcade anymore. We went to Dave and Buster’s for my birthday (Laureen actually surprised me this time), and although I had fun, I really didn’t do much game playing. Of course, my particular belief about D&B’s is that instead of walking into their arcade you could just as easily hold your wallet to a vaccuum cleaner and hit the ‘On’ switch. All of the games are timed, which means that if you want to continue on anything other than the one Ms. Pac Man/Galaga machine hiding in the back, you have to swipe your card another time. They use credits instead of dollars, and I know for a fact that this tactic make a person lose the sense of how much it’s actually costing them to play the game.
• I’m ready to be a father. I think I covered that above.
• I like Henry Rollins’ spoken word stuff.
• I’m not good at Warcraft III.
• I spend a lot of time surfing the net.
• My cholesterol’s too high.
• I have no idea what sort of fun exercise activity I’d like to do. I’ve thought of some things like fencing or racquetball, but those are the kind of activities where it costs a certain amount of money to do them, and if I’m not ready to commit to doing them on a regular basis, it’s wasted money.
• I need to take my lunch to work more.
• J. K. Rowling is a good author.
• I like Lawrence Block, Joan Hess, and Sue Grafton’s murder mysteries.
• Despite the logical reasons put forward by my conservative friends, I still don’t like the fact that we went into Iraq on the basis of finding Weapons of Mass Destruction. Before the invasion, the U.N. inspection team wanted more time to investigate in Iraq, and the U.S. said no. Now, we’re the ones wanting more time to find something, anything to back up one of the reasons for the war (yes, there are other reasons, I know, I know, don’t get your knickers in a twist) while the U.N. wants to get inspectors back there as quickly as possible.
• I dislike the fact that money in this country allows you more access to changing the way things work in terms of politics.
• I don’t see any way to make the system better without someone finding a way around it.
• I believe that the work I’m doing for my church has meaning and value, even if I feel so tired by doing it.
• I believe that people who say “Well, evolution’s still a theory. That means it hasn’t been proven.” have no clue what a scientific theory is.
• I want to get out of taking medicine for depression.
• I hate having my blood sugar drop around six in the evenings.
• I hate fainting whenever my blood is drawn.
• I’m troubled about this world. It requires faith in the next one to keep going.
• Racism exists in America. Every effort to make people of any ethnicity proud of their heritage winds up creating some type of racial tension in all people of other ethnicities (the same applies for sexual orientation, come to think of it).
• I don’t have a solution for that, either. “Kum by yah, my Lord, kum by yahhhhh…”
• I like Celtic traditional dancing.
• I believe that MTV and in particular rap videos of almost all stripes have done a disservice to African American children by presenting entirely unreal images of what matters in life. Of course, I’m white, so take the statement with that particular grain of salt, okay?
• I still love my wife, more so than ever before.
• I still love my family, my friends, my job, and most importantly my God.
• I still believe that no matter what, things will be fine. Sometime.

Starting on 33….
-Kevin