Another year, another...year

Oy, I'm so bad with dates I'm even late in wishing myself a happy birthday. Although I imagine most people don't bother to wish themselves a happy birthday. It's a nice courtesy, though. And I tend to be a rather courteous person. 

I had a nice laid-back time yesterday as I rang in the beginning of my 30th year. I had dinner with the parents (I requested one of my favorite comfort-foods: chili con carne and pasta), enjoyed a wonderful home-made gift that my mom put together while she was recovering from surgery, and then watched a movie with the two of them and Murphy. Very normal, very comfortable, very pleasant.

Then this morning I got to wondering if it's worse turning 29 or 30. I mean, this is the last year of my 20s. A whole decade of answering questions of "how old are you" with "twenty"-[something]. And now I'm watching that slip away like so many fine grains of a sand in a bad visual metaphor. I have a lot to accomplish before I'm 30, and I suppose to those who know me well it's fitting that I'm waiting until the last minute.

I get a kind of masochistic joy out of placing undue pressure on myself to complete projects and reach goals in a short period of time. Naturally, I have a well-thought-out rationalization for this. You see, if you take your time getting things done early and ahead of schedule, you get lazy. There's no URGENCY. The adrenaline's not flowing, the fire's not burning. And then you're done and what happens? You wonder why you didn't spend more time perfecting the final product. Did you work as hard as you could? No, of course not! No one does when they finish something early; there's always more time that can go into it. This is why I wait. I wait until there is no possible way that I can wait any more, then I expel every single ounce of productive energy that I have inside of me. When I'm done working, what I have in front of me is a brainchild of psychological (and maybe physical) blood, sweat, and tears, and there is no possibility to question why I stopped working early.

To continue this rationalization with an unnecessary analogy -- when you run a marathon, you don't start the day before and leisurely walk the course so that you can relax with a nice lemonade afterward. No, you freak out the night before, then you take off with the gun. And if you don't ultimately collapse at the finish line in a twisted heap of combined misery and ecstasy, then you didn't work hard enough. At least that's how I believe a marathon should be run.

But I digress...

Welcome, me, to the last 12 months of my 20s, and if you don't complete all of your goals, I will personally break your thumbs! And I don't want to break your thumbs, because they are also my thumbs, and I would like to continue using my thumbs. I would miss doing things like finger-snapping, giving the "OK" hand symbol, making various shadow puppets, and such.