Thursday, April 03, 2003

You Say It's Your Birthday..... Today is my birthday--I'm thirty-two years old.  Thirty-two isn't some milestone birthday, like thirty or forty or twenty-one or ten, but it is carrying some weight with me. I was going for a run this morning, and I'm definitely not in my best condition right now--any parent will tell you that it's hard to maintain the focus for a workout regimen in the first few months after a baby is born.  So I was struggling a bit, and looking at my watch, and lamenting how much it was hurting and how slow I was going.  I ran cross-country (very poorly) and track (reasonably well) in high school, and consequently I find myself consistently comparing my high school pace and fitness with my adult pace and fitness.  This is foolish, of course, but I've been able to maintain the illusion that I can get back to where I was then if I work hard enough, which I never do.  I was running along this morning, and thinking about my splits when I ran the 800 as a junior. And then it hit me--I am now twice as old as I was then.  I literally had to stop running for a minute.  In thinking about this episode, however, it occurs to me that I'm not feeling the burden of aging.  I am aware that some parts of my worldview have changed, in part due to age, and in part due to fatherhood.  Certainly there are physical changes, notably Nature's cruel, cruel tendency to transfer hair from the head to the back.  No, this is not me.  Thank F'ing god.  Can you believe this?  Lycanthropes Unite!  I feel young, essentially, and with these two awesome girls we have I feel in many ways like things are just getting started.  I still don't know what I want to do with myself once they start school in a few years and I have to grow up and find work.  And we're not homeowners or anything like that.  I'm not old...I'm not old...I'm not old.... Whatever negative feelings I do have about being sixteen-times-two were surely swamped when Mercedes sang Happy Birthday to me--her version goes like this: Happy Birthday to Daddy Happy Birthday to Daddy Happy Birthday to Daddy Happy Birthday to Daddy Happy Birthday to Daddy Happy Birthday to Daddy Happy Birthday to Daddy (repeat until throat is too hoarse to speak) 1:54:56 PM    Let's hear it. []