birfday

today i am 36, and i honestly don't have much to say about it except that i think i might skip this post and go back to bed, not because i am depressed about turning 36, but because my dream world - which so very rarely bothers to be active - went a little ape-shit last night (no worries - there were no women with blue skin haunting me, just...well, dreams!) and it's my birthday, so if i'm a little tired and feel like sleeping in, screw you, world. ah munna do it.

the one thing i wanted to get out this morning is a bit of a weird one. 36 is the first age at which i can truly relate to where my own father was at the same age. at 36, my father had packed us up and moved us to plano from our hometown in southern ontario. in fact, it was the year he turned 36 in which this happened (i think - my math is always poor, especially so at 6am, but born in '47 and the move in '83 would make him 36 that november, si?). there's nothing in particular attached to that, no resentments or overtly sentimental sudden feelings of deep connection for which i had always yearned, just the recognition that i am entering a phase of my life which is completely new to me. i am now old enough to remember what it was like for my father at my age. when he turned 36, i was 10 and going on 11, and there was major life change with that move, so i now have clear memories that go along with my father at this age. i know what our life was like at this age, and it's kind of a weird feeling, because i now can try with extra information to look back on my own perceptions of our life then through his eyes, or at least through the eyes of a man the same age.

in any case, happy birthday to me. here is to life on the far side of 35, new perspective, perhaps new beginnings and atonement for past mistakes and wrongs. and, by the way, it is beautifully, wonderfully, magnificently cold this morning, my birthday present from the world itself. 36, it says. time to feel alive again.