Have Your Cake and Eat It Too

Today I am filled with dread. It is the one day of the year where I reflect most poignantly about my life thus far, the various choices I've made, what has become of them, and where I am headed.

It's my birthday, and twenty-three feels like it crept up out of nowhere. I don't know that the number itself is what bothers me so much, but rather the startling speed of it's arrival. I remember back in my wee years, when birthdays still shown brightly in my mental calender-they took forever to get to. Eleven to twelve were eons apart, and my teen years looked an immeasurable distance away. Now I sit here, long past my twenty-first, having barely noticed as twenty-two whirled on by, and looking this new found age with an almost desperate need to cling to it. I'm not pining for days gone by, but I am not eager to move from where I am now. I always used to say that I could feel my youth slipping through my fingers (at what, seventeen?), and it's becoming uncomfortably more apparent.

I'm sure that this is a sentiment shared by many people of various ages and so forth. I admit that much of this stems from regret of things I haven't done, and things I wish had gone differently. The time for, and ability to change is not infinite, and I suppose that's what disconcerts me the most. I've been a static person for most of my life, and I am not quite who I wanted to be.

Worry not, eyebrow raisers, that hardly includes Dallas Cowboy cheerleader or day caregiver.

This is going to be a year for change, I think. I am not going to optimistically throw out lofty goals to practice for January, but I feel relatively certain that I will be able to look back at twenty-four and know that I did something out of the ordinary. We'll see, eh?

In the meantime, I'll raise my glass of Coke to my new copy of Grand Theft Auto IV, and the joys of digital vicarious living. Cheers.