Notes on two birthdays

Friday I turned 48, having been 47 for a year already. I really didn't want to do it.

I was fine with aging, but hitting the actual anniversary felt like a lot of pressure to feel celebratory and to want things, and I could not do that.

The last few years have been hard. One really bad year I hid my birthday on Facebook because I just couldn't bear the well wishes. It felt hypocritical, because I am really conscientious about that. If I find I can't wish you a happy birthday, I usually unfriend you, because I must not like you. Remembering people is important.

That year, I could not bear to be remembered, and I knew if I didn't take it down it would happen.

The next year wasn't quite as bad. I meant to allow the birth date to show again but then when I went to check I couldn't figure it out. I eventually got that back up.

This year I thought would be normal, but when I logged in there were only two birthday wishes and they were both in direct messages. I could have been okay with that, but it seemed not quite right, and I discovered people were not allowed to post on my wall.

I don't remember doing that, but it may explain why I haven't been getting a lot of political push back lately. I assumed the people who really hated the things I post had just muted me, but now I don't know.

Anyway, I changed that and received many well wishes, and if we'll see if it changes anything else. We are now officially in an election year.

I did a fundraiser last year. It reached goal and was for a charity I cared about, and so that was good.

Over the last year, every request I have seen for money - mostly for great causes - has been like a little stab. It made it hard to decide to do a fundraiser this year, but I did. Again, some money was raised, even without much action on my part. It's weird, but if I did contribute in some way, I will take it.

Like many 48 year old people, I have a 30 year high school reunion coming up. I suppose that is why I was thinking about my 18th birthday.

I was working at K-mart. We'd just had our Christmas party - a few weeks after Christmas - and it was not really great; a dark American Legion hall with not enough raffle prizes and nothing really memorable. However, Family Shopping Night before Christmas had been really nice. They have recently completely obliterated the building I worked at.

A-ha was officially still my favorite band, but I was singing a lot of Escape Club, and picking up bargain records at K-mart: Human League, Times 2, Men Without Hats, Modern English. Tower Records was still great, but I got a lot of cheap vinyl at work. I no longer have it; sorry, collectors.

I had given up on science completely when... well I might say when I couldn't wrap my head around AP Biology, but the truth was that I didn't try very hard. Not liking the teacher tended to be a real stumbling block for me, but I was working a lot and doing a lot of activities, and it just wasn't a match. Instead I took an extra English class, which may seem like favoring the right side of the brain at the expense of the left. I still want to bring that back into balance, some day.

Whatever else was not going right for me, I was sure that I would at least get the foreign language student scholarship and maybe the nice person scholarship (no, that was not the official designation for the second one, but that was basically what it meant). Wrong on both counts. I didn't really know how things worked. I know now that is a cultural capital issue, but I didn't even know there was such a thing then.

I'd had a room to myself for a while, but my brother moved back in shortly before his wedding, and my younger sisters had come in with me. The wedding was four days before my birthday, so I was just getting my privacy back.

It had been a year since my father disowned me (for the first time). I thought I was handling it pretty well, but that restlessness and my brain not cooperating on some things seems to have been related now. I mean, I still don't drive. It sure made the wedding stuff stressful, but I worked a lot and that helped.

The only thing I could have accurately predicted about my future was that I would go to University of Oregon and graduate. Well, I wanted to write, and I have written things. That didn't go as planned either.

I suppose the main difference is that I thought I could predict then, and I am a little bit more realistic about that now.

Without knowing quite how the year will go, I have things to work on and to learn, and I will just try.

I saw Frozen 2 not long ago. "My love's not fragile" (I hope not) is a close runner-up, but I think the most personally affecting line for me was "When one can see no future, all one can do is the next right thing."

That I can do.