thanks. 40 seems like a good age to me. in a lot of way i can not believe i made it this far, and i do not expect that i have 40 more birthdays coming. birthdays seem like a strange reason to celebrate, but we had a nice party on wednesday and another combo super bowl/birthday thing today. birthday parties remind me of how the unbelievably elderly always get a round of applause simply for their age. someone announces s/he is 102, and that virtually always receives a round of applause which to me usually sounds uneasy or tepid. i know it is not the spirit of things but to me this ritual of applauding the living is like booing the dead and waving off all the losers who only made it to 99, when for the most part extreme longevity is a matter of happenstance and luck -- that is, if living to 112 can be called lucky. i think that in future generations public discussion will openly question the value of human life and in particular the value of longevity, but i think we'll all be gone before that shift happens. my own age doesn't seem to mean much. i still feel like an emotionally underdeveloped child and i probably always will feel that way. it is hard to imagine myself as any kind of role model or person of distinction simply by virtue of my age and therefore presumed maturity or grownupedness. on the other hand if i was ever to go back to corporate or to get a so-called real job again i would probably be less self-centered about my role in the workplace. i don't know that that characteristic ever got in the way of things while at corporate but the constipated machinations of enormous organizations encouraged my paranoid imagineering that I'd get grinded up and spit out by the place either through deliberate intent or through clerical error.
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