Paranthetical Birthday

In lieu of a regular BeautifulDay post, I will henceforth be writing the god-awfully dull and rambling "birthday post". There are about 48 minutes left from this point until the official CDT calendar flipping of my birthday. (You can cut the tension with a knife, here.) At this point, please feel free to go re-organize the junk drawer in your kitchen, or have a sculpture contest of sorts with that weird sieve of dryer lint that would remind you of jai alai if you knew what that was. Basically this usually turns out to be a pretty boring exercise for everyone involved, and yet I continue ad nauseum, much like if you are on the Sparks Family Winter Holiday newsletter mailing list. You know who you are.

Usually birthdays bring out the categorizing, take-stock-of-it-all side of me. I have this and this and that, and have never/would like to/seemingly should have done that and that and this. I am trying very hard to resist that urge this year.

I have also found in my very intense pre-writing routine (also called "staring off into space on the couch") that this was much easier to write when I was a single guy. All my disaffection and angst and struggles seemed like monolithic, epic, unsurmountable things that I would tackle in my own headstrong and willful ways. Now, it all just kind of seems like whining. (But seriously, did I think I was THAT important?)

I mean, diapers and a mortgage will really put a damper on the 'ol world domination plans.

I was writing books with friends, I was reading everything I could get my hands on, I had valuable and exotic opinions on music and art; and I almost had politics and the world in general figured out. Everything was going my way (except for all the stuff that wasn't, but I was leaping like a spawn-maddened salmon upstream over every obstacle, except you know... saving money, or credit card debt, or being kind to others, or being healthy [sorry, liver]... but whatever, right? It was my birthday, damnit!) and things were clicking.

But now as I sit here as a 31-year old (midnight has come and gone whilst I typed, which is not quite as cool a way to spend a birthday-midnight as riding the needle ride on top of the Stratosphere, I might add) and look around at my life, its almost as if everything has been turned upside down. I am happy NOT being on the pathway to world domination. (Though I haven't totally discarded the idea of starting a religion. Have you seen the tax breaks?) I like buying diapers for my amazing kid, and being a bread-winner to pay off a mortgage and credit card debt and student loans to keep my wife and I in our house. I like picking mandarin orange slices out of the carpet, and wrestling with two 50 pound dogs with no regard for personal space. I like that my cat is mildly demented.

I like that my friends are out there somewhere making lives for themselves and going through things (new and different things than me, even) and I like it even better when we get to see each other for real, in person.

I like 18 year old Irish Whiskey, and I like this strange little concoction called an "Irish Car Bomb". I like being behind a bar more than in front of it, though.

I like getting dressed up, but only because it is the exception to the rule.

I like that people ask me sports trivia questions. If this means that Kevin Spacey will someday super glue a pill bottle to my hand and attempt to cut off my nose, then so be it. (There was also the Marcellus Wallace line from Pulp Fiction, but Fincher wins over QT everytime, sorry.) (Also Kitty from the X-Men, but I digress.)

I like random references.

There are a lot of things I like. And of course, some things I don't. But we'll save that for one of the other 365.25 days a year that isn't my birthday. Well, its a pretty happy 31 year old version of me. Maybe next year I'll get back to the gross overgeneralizations about my life and what is missing and all that jazz. Maybe not.

(If you made it this far, thanks for putting up with me for this.)

Happy Birthday, me. No candles, no friends tonight. Just me. And that's okay. I like me.