30
Earlier Cristina asked me if I felt bad about my impending 30th birthday. I immediately said no.
As it turned out, I had been thinking about this earlier. On my 20th birthday I was a year and a half into college, but other than that I was jobless and pretty much flat broke, living in my parents' house in a bedroom that had been split in half. It was like living in a dorm room that was 15 miles off campus. Responsibility did not belong in the same sentence as me at that point. The only saving grace is that my friends at the time didn't know what they were doing either, and we had a lot of fun going nowhere.
On my 30th birthday, I have a respectable home, a loving wife, an honest-to-God career, more than enough creature comforts, personal and professional goals, a small but tight group of friends, and all kinds of experiences and adventures under my belt. If you flip through all the way back through this journal, you can find most of them. There are too many to link to.
In the end I came to two conclusions:
1. Ten years is a lot longer than you think it is when you look at how much you can accomplish in that time.
2. If I have four or five more decades like this last one in front of me, I will have absolutely nothing to complain about when it's all over.
As it turned out, I had been thinking about this earlier. On my 20th birthday I was a year and a half into college, but other than that I was jobless and pretty much flat broke, living in my parents' house in a bedroom that had been split in half. It was like living in a dorm room that was 15 miles off campus. Responsibility did not belong in the same sentence as me at that point. The only saving grace is that my friends at the time didn't know what they were doing either, and we had a lot of fun going nowhere.
On my 30th birthday, I have a respectable home, a loving wife, an honest-to-God career, more than enough creature comforts, personal and professional goals, a small but tight group of friends, and all kinds of experiences and adventures under my belt. If you flip through all the way back through this journal, you can find most of them. There are too many to link to.
In the end I came to two conclusions:
1. Ten years is a lot longer than you think it is when you look at how much you can accomplish in that time.
2. If I have four or five more decades like this last one in front of me, I will have absolutely nothing to complain about when it's all over.