Happy Birthday Dear Jordan

     Tomorrow is my birthday, and I'll be turning twenty four in half an hour.  I've always believed that birthdays instead of New Years are the beginning and end of my years.  I don't usually remember what I did on New Years, but I can always recall who I spent my birthday with.  Last year I was in an airport terminal for the majority of the day, and in a car on the way home the other.  At some point I broke my Zune, and it was not a great day.  On my tenth birthday I received among other things a Linda Davis cassette tape, and a baseball mitt.  The Linda Davis album, I reordered a couple of months ago on EBAY for three dollars, because I missed it.  The baseball mitt gave me a burgeoning career of imaginary baseball playing.  That's right, I'm wearing a cup right now.

     My eighteenth birthday I spent with my favorite people.  I had just gotten my car a week before, and was scared to drive at night by myself.  So to relieve myself from the fear I sang Happy Birthday to myself for fourteen miles while I drove home in the rain.   At nineteen I was having the worst year of my life up until that point, and my world was imploding (that was the year I created this blog, actually).  As my gift a couple of my friends booked time for me in a recording studio to record some badly done renditions of karaoke songs.  It was a fucking dream come true.  My twentieth birthday I can't remember precisely but I'm pretty sure my new year was brought in at a bar.  I like to call that year of my life my blackout phase.  Not because I spent any period of time blacked out (I'm not much of a drinker), it was just such a chaotic time in my life that I barely remember any of it.  Though, honestly I did and said such stupid things, that this is probably for the best.

     But today I'll be twenty four, and I don't yet know if it will one day be one of the birthdays to stick out in my mind as great.  To celebrate it here I planned on writing my annual post of a list of things I wanted, although I think I'm beyond that now.  I think I'm at the point that I've stopped dreaming of having an Elton John impersonator sing me Happy Birthday.  Not that I'd say no to it, were someone to arrange it. I just don't hope for it like I used to.  Instead I think I'll write about what this year was for me.  What happened to me, and what happened for me.  Since my last birthday my two best friends moved to Cleveland, and that sucked so hard I can't even begin to tell you.  I do not do well with separations (which is something my nineteenth year taught me well).  Though, I've reconciled with the fact that I am just as lucky to see them a couple of times a year, as I was to see them every weekend.  They are that awesome.

     This year I continued to work at a job that I hate, but that ended up being a good thing too because it made me realize that there was no fucking way I could continue to work there, or an establishment like it for the rest of my life.  I realized that I had to go back to school, something I had been telling myself I was going to do eventually, but was too lazy to actually accomplish.  Though, I ended up doing it and I'm really glad I did.  When I left school the first time, my grades were in shambles, and I skipped class more often than I attended it.  Though I still skipped a fair amount of classes last semester, I still ended up on the President's list, which trust me wasn't even all that hard and I really shouldn't be mentioning it because it makes me sound like a tool. In February my dog died, and although this sounds completely ridiculous, there was a period of time afterward where I thought my world had stopped.  He was one of the good things, one of the good constant things that kept me going.  I really miss him.

     In short, this year has been completely ridiculous.  It seems like all of the things I had been dreading for years finally came out all at once.  Though maybe that was a good thing too, maybe that means that there isn't much bad coming my way in the coming twelve months.  I feel like all I've been talking about are bad things, but there were good things too.  I finally saw Britney Spears,  I reconnected with people who had been gone from my life for too long, I read a lot of funny really wonderful things, I got contacts, and I got better a little every day in being comfortable with myself.  I've decided that I am going to write a list after all.  Not one of wants, and material things, but more like New Years resolutions.  If the New Year starts on my birthday, then I think I should resolve to do some things on this day too.  I have to make the most of it now, because I know I am now only one year away from having my quarter life crisis.

I resolve to:


Stop being so hard on myself
Stop fantasizing about doing things, and actually do them
Think harder, read more, write better
Be up for anything
Meet her
Pass Math 113
Sing louder, laugh harder, get really mad every once in a while
Stop having delusions of grandeur, and start sticking to a budget
Eat more/less cookie cake.