And thinking ahead

The end of next month is my birthday. It's a big one.

(I find myself, not so much mourning my youth, as going "how in the heck did I get to be 50? I am in no way mature enough to be 50. I don't even know how 50 year olds are supposed to behave.")

My parents are already asking what I want as a gift but I am coming up blank. (Challenge level: Ideally, it needs to be something orderable out of a print catalog - yes, I know, I know. I looked through the most recent Vermont Country Store and found nothing).

I dunno. Is it too sad to say "There's nothing I can think of that I need, don't get me anything?" I don't know.

I'm also trying to figure out what/when to do something fun for my birthday. My "tradition" is to take a Saturday - in the past, when less was expected of me outside of working hours, it was usually the Saturday immediately after my birthday - and go somewhere for the day. It used to be McKinney, until the traffic got too awful and a couple of the stores I used to like closed or changed to the point where I didn't recognize them. More recently, it's been Whitesboro, which is nice, because (a) there is a yarn shop and a quilt shop and (b) it's far enough away to be a treat, but not hours and hours of awful traffic away.

(And, yes, yes, I know the cultural stereotype that says "only losers do their birthdays alone" and yes, in some ways I am a "loser," or at least what The World defines as such, and every year that ticks by, I am closer to being able to say "You know? Maybe The World is actually wrong." And maybe I'm not the only one:

How often does the world say—now, it is time to be away from other people? Never. We never hear that said out loud. The only thing that big-name annual events do (birthdays, “summer”) is demand your presence, your time, your company, your giving. It’s only in the unnamed slivers of the year that you can snatch the time you really need to understand who you are, away from the crowd.

(from this, though I'm not sure I'm on-board with the rest of the article: "cuffing season"? Ew. I'd rather have a season where I could be physically close to someone in the sense of having someone sitting reading in the same room with me...and someone to talk to occasionally. Though apparently it is a thing: single people pushing for relationships because, well, winter. And yeah, it would be nice to have someone to talk to but one of the things about being 50 is some of that other stuff matters less.)

But yeah: I usually do my birthday alone because I don't have anyone to do it with, and the pressure of calling someone who is kinda-sorta a friend up and asking them to, and then trying to do the logistic dance of schedules, and then finding out that in fact, no, every Saturday remotely close to my birthday their kid has a basketball game or something, makes be just decide that maybe being a "loser" is easier....and so I set out alone. I'm sure I stick out like a sore thumb everywhere I go, and maybe some shops even know me as "the woman who is always alone" but it seems to be my fate in life...)

But anyway. This year, not so much. The Saturday before is the big recruitment event and while I've managed to slope off doing Science Olympiad this year (because none of the events are in my wheelhouse and I'm d....d if I'm going to try to learn something fast enough to be an expert on it AND write an exam for middle schoolers), I can't totally slope off, so I'm doing Honors Day instead, which means I'm committed until noon at least. (And I should e-mail my chair a reminder that (a) I won't be at the prepping meeting for Sci Oly today and (b) please don't let anyone nominate me to do anything like someone did in faculty meeting and you verbally slapped them down for it)

And the next weekend? It's Glenna's memorial service, and as I was friends with both Glenna and Gordon (Gordon died earlier last year), I feel like....well, as I've said before, it's the "last kind thing" a person can do for someone, to feed their family at the funeral/memorial service. And there aren't that many people any more at church who can do that sort of thing (lots of our younger folk work Saturdays, and some of the older ones aren't as capable any more).

And yes, I know: I spend an awful lot of time and energy doing stuff for other people and not getting to do what I would like to do or had planned on doing but I feel kind of like that's my role in life, that I'm not really totally entitled to go "No, I can't do that volunteer thing because I have something else I want to do even though it's not pressing" (This may be because all too often when I ran volunteer stuff - back when I led the Youth Group - I'd have people volunteer and then never show, and it turned out it was that there was something "more interesting" but not urgent at that point in time, and I don't want to let people down).

So anyway. At this point I am now left with February 16 or March 9 as days to celebrate my "birthday." I don't know. (I don't get any weekday where there'd be time; even on Fridays I get out of class at 11 and after an hour's drive down to Whitesboro - well, it gets dark early still this time of year, and I'd also want to stop off in Sherman on the way home to get groceries and stuff)

And yes, I know, that's spoiled and maybe a little Rain Man of me, but I kind of want to throw a tantrum that if I celebrate my birthday, it has to either be two and a half weeks early, or two and a half weeks late.

And part of me wants to go: Maybe if I don't mark the day I won't get older. Maybe if I just ignore it: refuse presents, don't do anything special, then I won't be older. (Yes, that's ridiculous. But this week I learned of some Japanese (? or maybe Korean, I forget) popstar who claims to be 'forever 17,' despite being 50 or nearly that age. And frankly, yes: I can't wrap my head around my age. If you asked me, catching me totally unawares, "What happened 50 years ago?" I'd go "World War II" which would have been the correct answer when I was in my 20s, back in the 1990s. One discombobulating thing over Christmas break was reading the paper in my parents' town - which always does a little "historical notes" column with things they reported on 100, 75, 50, and 25 years ago, and having some of the 50-year-ago things being very shortly before I was born. Oh, I know I am almost 50, it's just hard to get used to. Though I also admit that I feel like for me to pretend to be younger than I am is kind of pathetic too.)

So I don't know. I'm caught in kind of a funk but also a dilemma: there's no good way to celebrate my birthday and I can't think of anything that would make me unusually happy, but I also feel like NOT doing anything would make me too sad.

(I suppose the one thing about going out on March 9 is that I *think* the "free birthday gift" at Ulta only comes available on or after your actual birthday day, so....I'll have to check on that)

What I really wish? Is I had good friends locally who were interested in the same stuff that I was, and that we all had time to take a day and do a quilt-shop hop or something similar. But you don't always get what you want, and in fact, sometimes it feels like you rarely get what you want...

Updated: I just realized that Wednesday, March 6 is assessment testing here, and if it works out like other years, we will be asked to cancel classes all day....and if that is the case, I could go to Whitesboro then, and the bonus would be that Lovejoy's would be serving its full lunch that day (It does MWF, and sometimes has cold sandwiches Saturday, but their warm food is better).

So maybe that solves it. Also going out on a weekday is just nicer because few people are out.