Tag: shedding skins | The World According to MEH

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The Changing, Part II: I Got a New Attitude, Bee-yotches!

Posted on April 7, 2011 by admin • 13 Comments

Listen up, bee-yotches. In my last post, I gave a eulogy for the past incantations of me. It was surprisingly hard to do especially as I’m in the midst of grieving for her/them/the past/all the years lost/winter being over, but I needed to have some temporary finality on the subject. And, since I’m a writer, I find that I figure things out best by writing about them.

Now, today is my birthday. Longtime readers know that I have a tempestuous relationship with my birthday. I disliked it as a kid, positively loathed it through my twenties and early thirties as it was a nasty reminder of the fact that I was, yes, indeed, alive in body and that I was a year older with nada to show for it. In the last five years or so, I had been slowly working my way to being neutral about my birthday. I didn’t love it, but I didn’t hate it any more.

Last year, I returned to struggling with it, and it’s been even harder this year. Why? Well, first of all, it’s a round number–40. Now, I have never cared about my actual age. In fact, at the beginning of the year, I just say I’m a year older in order to prep myself for my birthday. Of course, then when my birthday arrives, I sometimes get confused as to how old I really am, but that’s neither here nor there.

40. That’s old. Or at the very least, middle-aged.

I fixate on certain things (no, really?), and apparently, 40 is one of those things. I keep staring at the number as if it’s an alien being with three heads. It doesn’t look anything like I feel. On the one hand, I wasn’t taught healthy ways to navigate the world when I was younger, and I stayed frozen in time for fifteen years. So, on that hand, I feel very young, as if I’m just learning to walk. On the other hand, I’ve experienced things that I sincerely would not wish on someone I loathed because the way back is just so long and arduous. I feel as if I’ve been alive forever, so on that hand, I feel very old.

40? How can I be 40? What the Hades happened to my twenties and thirties? For that matter, where are my aughts and teens?

Destination Unknown

Posted on June 7, 2009 by admin • 6 Comments

journey First, your video for the day. It’s Destination Unknown by Missing Persons. Why? Because.

Second, I’m going to tell you a little story. Once upon a time, I used a typewriter. I know, I know, so quaint! I thought it was a big deal when I got a typewriter that had the key you could punch to white out your mistakes instead of having to do it by hand.

Then, along came the computer. Now, my brother took to the computer like the proverbial duck to water. He was a geek before it was uber-trendy to be one, and he thrived once he got his hands on a….I don’t know what the hell it was. A computer! An expensive one! I, on the other hand, resisted any attempts to be assimilated into the computer matrix (I never did like change), and I held out admirably until I went to college. I didn’t want to learn some newfangled fad that would just go away in a few years. Email, what? What the hell is that? What were forums and chatrooms? I was sure I didn’t want to know.