CLOWN GIFTS. 50. THRASHING ON.
I started the morning looking to repost something, the thought of settings the sausages at the end of my right hand into motion, daunting. Plus I had no vision for what to write. Still don’t. Visions don’t need to be crystal clear though. Maybe we can force them with some effort.
June is here and the countdown to my birthday has started in earnest. As many of my friends have already had 50 year old parties this year, I’m kind of at a loss. It feels like when I had young children and we went to 30 birthday parties a year. For toddlers. The adults making small talk, maybe not even knowing half the people when you left. Trying again the next weekend when 3 hours of your life would disappear into dirty diapers, cake and clowns. Clowns. One year someone gifted us a clown for our daughter’s party. You can’t say no to this. No matter how bizarre it is. It. Was. Bizarre.
Clowns are more polarizing than politics, and or are possibly the same thing. Frightening to some, funny at times, possibly serial killers and or full of creepy skeletons in the closet stories. Sounds a lot like Washington.
Anyway, 50 is coming I hot and I, per usual, am being difficult. Somewhere along the way I’ve developed this thing where I don’t really want a celebration, except I want a celebration, but I can’t decide what it is, so I put it off and do nothing and then mope around all day on my birthday, in some sort of “don’t like at me, I’m hideous” drama. No one ends up happy and I end up just older and moving along. Whoa is me. Whoa. Is. Me.
Maybe I should just get a clown.
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I’ve been counting down (or is it up?) to 50 for a few years. As is customary. Mid life crisis in full swing, I wonder constantly about this so called milestone. I get that we mark things in decades, round numbers and the worlds fighting off tracking life in 13 year increments. Only a psychopath would do that. It would at least give me 2 more years to consider.
We all know that when a birthday, anniversary, Christmas etc. comes along that it’s passing is always a whimper. That nothing really happens between a Saturday and a Sunday. Yet still we dwell and lament or whatever. If I had 1/10th action of every thought about the next decade/rest of my life, I’d be contemplating where to buy a vacation home.
Instead I (we) thrash on. Trying to show the world we aren’t dead yet. That 50 year old us isn’t that different than 25 year old us. Some of us still lost and or starting over. The reality is that the age doesn’t really matter that much. Sure we’d like to be fitter, stronger, and be able to read the ingredients of the package so we can assess our food allergy risks, but we do better to live a little and quit worrying so much about it.
The epitome of easier said than done.
All of the above and many of my posts make it sound like I am unemployed and searching for a new career. That’s not lost on me and of course not true. I naturally question everything and have lived the last 30 years or so with an openness to jump. Strangers think it’s cool and edgy. My family thinks it’s terrifying. One of my business partners has said often that I live like I’m one good offer away from up and leaving town at all times. There’s truth to all of it. This makes me question my time. My mortality. My “what am I going to be when I grow up?”
And so 50, 51, and on do loom large in my head. It feels urgent. Even if it’s not.
The reality is that I’m making more out of it than I should. We all do.
Today I’ll try and see pictures of me and wonder who that old guy is and be thankful I have the options to jump. That I have the options to celebrate, that I have the options to choose whether I’m old or not.
Even if I really can’t.
#hugsandhi5s
