They Say It's Your Birthday

Yesterday was the second anniversary of my twenty-ninth birthday, so hooray!  (Now I can shut up talking all the time about how I'm 30 and instead spend the next few years never not mentioning how I'm "in my early thirties.") 

I celebrated last night by going to a track workout.  Everyone was like, "Becky!  Who in their right goddamned mind goes to a track workout in 35-degree weather on their birthday?"  To which I could only respond, "You do know me, right?"  The truth is, little makes a person feel more alive than running to the point of feeling like death, and it is with utmost sincerity that I say that I went to the workout last night because I could think of few more life-affirming things I could do for myself on my birthday...

January 22 hasn't always been kind to me.  Just two years ago, in this blog's second post, I wrote about how I wound up as the designated driver for a group of smokers for my 29th, languishing in bar-purgatory when all I wanted to do was go home...and the entire reason I wrote that entry was because it was actually one of the better birthdays...  That same scene would play out very differently were it to happen now.  You can no longer smoke at the bar we were at, and, more importantly, I no longer allow men who are using me as a chauffeur to dictate when I get to go home. 

There's a line at the end of that entry where I say (quite truthfully), "...there isn't a single person in the city of Memphis anymore who would call me up and say, 'Hey, let's go celebrate.'"

And that's another way things are different.

A lifelong introvert, I used to think that the ultimate in social success was having a gang of friends at your disposal telling you what you wanted to do for fun. 

But now that I have grown terribly old and wise, I see that that isn't true.  I have so many wonderful people in my life who contacted me yesterday, in a variety of mediums, and I could have easily found a group to go stir up trouble with.  But what did I wind up doing? 

I bundled up, and I went to the track workout. 

"Fun," like most everything else, is ultimately sourced from within, and though I'm still a little disbelieving that I'm now (gulp) 31 years old, it's a gotta be worth the upward-ticking numbers to get a little hard-won self-confidence.  I may not be where I thought I would be at this age, but hell, I'm better off than I was at every age before this one, and so I've gotta be doing alright.

Happy birthday to me. :)