Behold, for the world is orderly and requires you to have a place within it.
It requires that you serve a purpose, find a slot to insert yourself into, do your part to feed the zeitgeist and benefit your fellow humans.
I have recently spent a week of vacation ignoring this concept.
Tradition states that I take the week around (in this case, before) my birthday off from work. Mostly because I have spent many of my birthdays over the years at work, instead of lazily sitting at home allowing a tiny dog to lick my toes while binge-watching episodes of The Sopranos and drinking beer. I feel I have reached an age where working on my birthday is A Wrong Thing.
I had grand plans for projects that I wanted to accomplish during the 8-day break. I accomplished a small amount of these, but not enough to make it particularly worth mentioning. This was a week of vacation that followed a serious week of The Busy at work. I needed to decompress.
Instead, I lazed around, ran the errands with The Beloved Kim, and took in a bit of theater. I watched a ho-hum movie (Dark Phoenix), and a pretty damn good movie (Godzilla: King of the Monsters).
I absorbed several of the new offerings on Netflix, most of which were a disappointment.
We upgraded our phones, from aging, twitchy Galaxy S7s to shiny new S10 pluses. They have many features, and the first 24 hours was like learning to fly the space shuttle. This is because I am old. My first cell phone had a bag around it.
I gorged on cake flavor samples for my daughter's impending wedding cake (picture above), and again on Saturday as the final year of my 40s roared to life with the inertia of a bloated toad on a straining lillypad.
Roughly 300 people wished me well on The Facebook Mess, reminding me that it's nice to be appreciated for converting oxygen into carbon dioxide.
At some point during my birthday Saturday, I ran into my old friend Corey, who had posted the thing you see below earlier on The Facebook Mess:
Oh yes. They WILL be mine.
So THAT will need to happen at some point. I nearly wept with joy when I saw them. I'm not the biggest fan of the vinyl figures, really. But this is Rush.
The birthday was nice. I was able to enjoy some time with my children, both of their significant others, the missus...plenty of the family. I opened gifts, many of them books. That always makes me happy.
The week also included a medical scare in the family, which served to remind me that I need to work harder to make sure the people important to me are reminded that they are important to me. A list that needs to include myself, as well. As I write this on Monday, I am roughly 24 hours away from being yelled at by my doctor during the annual checkup for being a mammal that is larger than it should be.
STATUS REPORT:
What I'm Hearing: In the car, the experiment with XM continues...something I'd spent years rallying against. I'm currently reliving the days of Aquanet, jackets with backpatches, and evenings of stale beer with Hair Nation. I've also discovered, but haven't listened to yet, the Golden Age of Radio Classics channel. The comedies and dramas from the 30s, 40s and 50s have always been a guilty pleasure of mine. As I mentioned above, I am old.
What I'm Watching: The Netflix binges of the last two weeks have included the final season of Jessica Jones, which was a disappointment; and Our Planet, which was amazing. If you don't cry at the part with the walruses, then you have no soul and should probably report somewhere for adjustments or having one installed.
Kim and I have abandoned Psych after three episodes. It just isn't speaking to us on any meaningful level.
What I'm Reading: The Image comics title Criminal is good. Dangerously good. Ed Brubaker is an amazing writer and fills me with creative shame. I will fight the urge to go back and give him a lot of money for the original stories that came before this new monthly series. I will fail to accomplish this.
What I'm Working On: As I said, this was a lazy vacation. It had roughly one hour of work in it on a new story idea. It's far too early in the process to say anything about the story. After a creative Dust Bowl it takes an awful long time to get the seed to germinate in the soil.
That's all for now. Go tell someone you love how important they are to you. And watch those freaking walruses on Netflix. You need to have your perspective torn apart every now and then to stay human...