Tag birthday (3)
post-birthday blues
Mood: stressed
Posted on 2009-04-21 13:01:00
Tags: health rant birthday work wedding politics
Words: 297
Thanks everyone for the birthday wishes! I had a nice dinner and post-dinner Rock Band session (we're Rock Immortals now!) and caught up a bit with my family. And we're making really good progress on wedding stuff, so that's gotten a lot less stressful. Also, now I'm 27, which is 33, and next year I'll be 28 which is a perfect number! (after that, it's all downhill, I'm sure)
That notwithstanding, things kinda suck right now. Let me run down why, because I'm sure you're all dying to know!
Torture - So when Ex-President Bush said "We don't torture", apparently what he meant was "We don't torture, except when we do". This is not terribly surprising, but it is a little depressing. (we waterboarded one guy 183 times in a month even after he had given up intelligence) I haven't had the heart to read the memos, but I applaud Obama for releasing them.
Work - The last week of work has been the worst week in at least a year. (I wish I had some sort of device where I recorded how work went that day, then I could track the data over time and say definitively how bad last week was!) This week is shaping up to be somewhat better, but it looks like I'm going to be generally stressed for at least another month and a half.
Teeth - As I mentioned, my filled tooth still hurts, and my mom and djedi convinced me to see the dentist again. And they took an X-ray and it looks like I need yet another root canal, to the tune of $1200 out of pocket. I'm going to get a second opinion, which means more work and stress and time away from work, which means more work stress. Argh.
it's my birthday!
Mood: excited
Posted on 2006-04-20 10:04:00
Tags: birthday
Words: 134
Today's a little busy, so I'll cut to the chase - it's my birthday! I don't have time for deep birthday ruminations, but I'll do some quick hits:
- 24 is a good number! It's 4!, and the name of a fun math card game (as mentioned in Wikipedia!). And an interesting-looking TV show that I've only seen half an episode of.
- 25 will be even better - discounts on car insurance ahoy!
- I'm declaring myself not newly out of college anymore. Which makes me something of which I'm not entirely sure. (although I wish random people I meet would stop assuming I'm still in school at UT!)
- I don't know where I'll be next birthday, so that's exciting.
- djedi's dissertation is today! (also, I get cookie cake!)
- Chunky bacon!
Well, that's all I've got, I guess.
thoughts on my birthday (well, about my birthday, since today isn't my birthday)
Mood: pensive
Music: Dexter Freebish - "Leaving Town"
Posted on 2005-04-18 14:11:00
Tags: essay birthday
Words: 539
"Every overhyped lj post has a beginning..."
I've been thinking about birthdays and, more generally (but not much more generally!) age lately. I skipped first grade, so I've always been young for my age, and I usually took math classes that were a few years ahead of my grade. The upshot of this is that I was usually the youngest kid in the class by far.
So I think because of that, that kinda became my identity. It didn't matter that I wasn't the top student in the class (although I sometimes was) - for a while I was a novelty because I was so young, but even after that I could always tell myself that, even though kids did better than I did, I was younger than they were, so it didn't matter. In my mind, when I would consider my ranking in the class (I was pretty competitive academically for a while in middle/high school...), I was kinda in my own category, so I always won.
Another effect was that I started to identify as the young kid. So, even when I came to Rice, I wanted people to know that I was young, because that made me special. In the past, this had provided me with other people who would sorta hang out with me a bit just because I was young. (at Rice, I had the additional "specialness" of being a professor's son) And it did sort of continue at Rice, to a point (hanging out with djedi and blamantin wasn't just because I was young, but it certainly was a not-too-infrequent topic of conversation :-) ).
So now I'm out in the real world, and all of a sudden I'm not the youngest at work. And I felt kinda weird about that, and it took me a while to figure out why, and the preceding is what I came up with.
But now things are different (not that I'm making this change now, just that it happened a year or so ago). I don't feel the need to be "special" in some obvious way. I have good friends, a good job, djedi, and I don't feel like I need a "gimmick" to have people interested in me. This is healthy and a good thing.
And so, I guess I've become a lot more relaxed about age - I know occasionally people get sensitive about getting old and whatnot, and I do have those feelings occasionally as well, but I'm usually able to shake it off pretty well. Maybe it's like my rebelling against the hypersensitivity I used to feel to my age, but I just feel like it's something that happens and there's no point worrying about it. I used to be really bad about trying to change the past (when I was in high school and I would misplace something, I would always beat myself up as I was looking for it, wishing that I had put it in its right place), and now I just try to deal with things in the present as they come up.
The End...?
(Disclaimer: nothing in here is meant to blame djedi or blamantin for my age issues - I definitely had them before coming to math camp/Rice. That is all.)
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