XXVII

Being the weirdo I am, I take note of such insignificant matters as what letters have or have not been used as the first letter in the title of one of my posts. After today, the only letters I won’t have used as a first letter are U, V, and Z. Those will have to come, but for today, I finally found a way to start with the letter X, and that is by celebrating my 27th birthday, Roman style.

Originally, I didn’t think I would announce my birthday on here. You know, protect my anonymity and discourage identity theft by keeping myself as enigmatic as possible. Now anyone who reads this will know right away that my birthday is October 7, 1978. But what’s the sense in living in paranoia? Anyone who would make the effort to find out more information on me, thus making my birth date even slightly useful, could probably have done so without the assistance of my blog. I’ll save my regret for the day I end up like one of those people in the Citibank commercials. Until then, I'll enjoy sharing my day with my cyberfriends.

So what’s on the agenda for my “big day”? Sadly, it’s much more chore-oriented than I would like. But I guess that’s okay. It’s started off well enough. My fiancée bought me some Krispy Kreme to be sweet. I’ve already eaten the original glazed, but I still have left a raspberry Bismarck (does this really have to be capitalized? My word processor seems to think so) and a cinnamon apple filled (which is probably my favorite of the Krispy Kreme clan). And we’ll probably go out to dinner and a movie tonight, which, after a month of frugality, will seem very special. Other than that, I need to do some shopping, get fitted for a tuxedo, and probably move more of my stuff. I have until tomorrow night to be completely out of here, but there’s still more left than I would like at this point. Oh well.

But to give my readers a bit more substance, aren’t birthdays a funny thing once you’re out of high school? It is at this point that age becomes ambiguous. Once you can’t fall back on what grade you’re in to give you an automatic chronological framework for your life, it’s hard to remember how old you are. You honestly have to stop and think about it for a minute. In college (and in the work field), your peers are all different ages, so there’s nothing to go on. In fact, being 27, I sometimes remember that, for all I know, my fellow students think of me as “the older guy.” Not because 27 is all that old, but because I have a receding hairline and a beard and, ever since my early 20’s, some people have honestly assumed I’m in my early 30’s. So it’s weird to think I’m chatting it up with these 20-year-olds that I think of as being the same age as I am, and maybe they’re thinking they’re talking to the “middle-aged” guy in class or something. Then again, there are students I have assumed are younger than me that have ended up being older. So I probably shouldn’t assume so much of myself, even if negatively so.

Okay, that’s my attempt at deep thinking for this week. Give me a break, it’s my birthday. And it's early, and I'm tired, because I got up early. So I'm very rambly. Deal with it. Maybe in my next post, I’ll discuss my social security number.