Category: Personal (Page 24 of 25)
When I first got serious with my now-fiancee I spent a lot of time with her family. Her niece and nephews took a liking to me, and at one point started calling me “Uncle D,” which I found amusing and flattering.
To avoid offending or pressuring me, my fiancee’s sister told her brood not to call me “uncle,” because I wasn’t one yet, and it could make me uncomfortable. That changed the kids’ tune: to their mother’s chagrin, hey began asking me, “David, when are you going to propose to Amy so we can call you Uncle David again?”
As soon as I got engaged, the game changed. No longer were the children waiting for me to become Uncle David; now it was I who was told to wait. They finally had the upper hand and they knew it.
So now I get cards like this.
My birthday is Saturday. I will be 30 years old. For the most part I’m ignoring it.
Contrary to the custom of the last few years, I am not having a party. I have not requested anything in the way of gifts. My nice family birthday dinner was instead a low-key brunch that included my future in-laws. My fiancee is taking me to Cafe Boulud Saturday night, but it’s her insistence that I do something special more than it is mine.
I don’t mind turning 30. I’m very much ready for it—between business school, engagement, and the progression of life in general, I am prepared for the roll of the odometer.
But when compared to the other big-ticket items in my life’s shopping basket, the milestone birthday just doesn’t rate. I don’t want to think about a party; I don’t want to coordinate two dozen people, or even have someone else do it for me, since I’ll be involved. I have too much else on the brain. See you at the wedding, folks.
I expected this little essay to reveal much more about my feelings as I approach 30. I suppose the lack of excitement says it all.
I have my mother’s sneeze.
I have my mother’s sneeze.
It’s a big, satisfying sort of sneeze, high-pitched and assertive, a face-twisting “ehh-echhu!” that usually hits in pairs, not threes.
My nose-blowing is my father’s, a hearty, head-clearing honk that can turn heads. I usually leave a crowded room to blow my nose without disturbing anyone.
The runny nose causing the sneezing and nose-blowing today is neither Mom’s nor Dad’s but the product of my ENT, who tinkered extensively with the inner workings of my schnoz today and reduced me to a mucusy, sneezy mass.
I’m going to go and lay down for a while.
I generally tire of the entries on my site 10 days or so after they’re posted. More recent entries entertain me, both the linked content and whatever it is I’ve written in conjunction to them (or the expository mini-essays I write).
I read this page today and didn’t like what I saw. It wasn’t fun; it wasn’t entertaining; it wasn’t what I normally expect of myself. The entries that were here have been shuttled prematurely to the archives, preserved for posterity but no longer prominent and awaiting digestion.
The past few months I have had a lot to share but not a lot to say, which I discovered recently and have felt even more since. This site may benefit from a links area, like all the kids are doing these days, but that would leave me with very little to write at all.
A wet or messy dog shakes its entire body down, from head to tail, to rid its exterior of whatever is polluting it. Right now I need something like that for my sentence composition.
Pardon me while I clear my head. I’ll be back before the winter’s out.
Sometimes your past work ages better than expected.
Speaking of which, I have to get the 2002s on this site to 2003. Soon.
The Ideapad has been filled with links and news rather than essays lately. There’s a reason for that.
For an assortment of reasons, I’m prsently tapped out. Creatively, that is. Creativity ebbs and flows, and I am in an ebb.
Many factors are obvious: I am in business school, which soaks up much of my time and thought; my days have been overtaken by personal issues (fiancee, dog, apartment construction, furniture, finances, to name a few); I have recently quieted down my involvement in several online communities.
Yet something greater is at work. I am losing interest in many of the weblogs and sites that I visit on the Web. I’m two weeks late in submitting my next Digital Web column, which may not get written at all, if this pace continues. I have composed just three original expository pieces for the journal since October.
The workaday events of my daily life are vibrant and exciting this winter. Business school in particular has invigorated dormant recesses of my brain. What I need next is a spark to reignite my creative half, something to arouse the dynamism that propelled my design and written work the past few years.
You’ll know when I find it. Stick around.
Approximately 450 pages of reading, 85 pages of photocopies, 80 M&Ms, 70 Skittles, 34 new friends, 33 pages of handwritten notes, 27 hours of sleep, 16 statistics problems, 15 bottles of water, nine holes of Golden Tee, six pages of typewritten assignments, five scrambled egg and bacon breakfasts, four hours of team-building, four late nights, three case studies, two cocktail parties, two games of foosball, one short burst of racquetball, one movie, and one new word (“mantyhose”) later, I love business school.
My First Finals is a piece I wrote for Ticketstubs, Matt Haughey’s fine (and long-overdue!) new Web site dedicated to, well, ticket stubs.
Update: Ticketstub Project is today’s Yahoo Pick.
I’m getting search requests for “charley pictures,” and who am I to disappoint?