Today is My Birthday!

I am 62 years old, which sounds odd to me because I spent all last year thinking I was 62. That comes with a certain amount of gravitas, which I lack. I am going to be one of these old people who are a little too loud and mirthful, I guess.

At 62, I’ve gotten through a lot. At this point I feel I could survive anything. This is not the case; sooner or later something is going to kill me. I hope not for a while because I still have a lot of things I want to do.

I’m going to spend today working (of course), then relaxing and eating lamb chops for supper. Not an exciting day, but an excellent one. Happy birthday to me!

Happy Birthday to Me!

Today is my 61st birthday. I made it through 60, which was not as traumatic as I thought it would be. I had moments where I felt like I aged overnight (and apparently, we go through an ‘aging spurt’ at age 60). Most of the time, though, I thought “Oh, yeah. I don’t have to worry about that anymore. I’m old.”

I plan to spend this birthday quietly. Going to work, checking Facebook for birthday wishes, going out to dinner at a steakhouse. My birthday present is a mug that says “Coffee? What about second coffee?” a la ‘second breakfast’ in Lord of the Rings.

I am hoping for a good day, as I always request from the universe: “… a good day, a productive day, a day where I do what You want me to.”

A Lack of Pattern

I’m trying to analyze which posts of mine are most successful — prompted posts? My own ideas? Short posts? Long post? Personal posts? Posts about writing? I have come to the conclusion that I can’t predict what will get me more viewers.

I’ve always thought prompted posts performed better than non-prompted posts, long posts better than shorter posts, and posts about writing better than personal posts.

Yesterday, a short prompted post about what personality traits I disliked — with no title — performed better than any post I’ve had in the past couple weeks. This is expected because the prompted posts appear to get more circulation. Yet I’ve had other prompted posts only get as many likes as one I’ve written without a prompt.

My best performing post of all time had to do with my wedding anniversary. Other posts (even about birthdays) have gotten little attention.

There seems to be a randomness to what plays well and what does not, which means I’m learning nothing about how to improve my traffic.

A Very Good Weekend

My birthday weekend (when you turn 60 you get a whole weekend) has turned out to be — I’m having trouble finding the exact word. “Special” has an implication of something engineered to be perfect for one’s birthday. This was more like serendipity in action.

We arrived in Kansas City Friday night after eating dinner in St. Joseph up the road, and we arrived at the 21c Hotel, one of my favorite spots. It’s an artsy hotel, which appeals to my writer self, and part of the reason I do Kansas City trips is inspiration.

On Saturday, we started the day with breakfast at City Diner, which is truly a diner:

It has the settled-in look of a real diner, with hot sauce for your eggs and a menu of breakfast and burgers and fries.

From there, we spent some time at Broadway Cafe, so I could write and figure out a printing problem with a brochure I want to hand out for the book fair at the end of September. Broadway Cafe is a space for writing, and their coffee is perfect. I drank a depth charge (coffee with a shot of espresso) for the first time, and it was stout!

My husband and I were going to see Spirited Away at 3 at the Screenland Armour, so when we were done with coffee and writing, we noted that we would not have enough time to get lunch at Choga (way over in Overland Park when we were in mid-KC) so I suggested Blue Nile, an Ethiopian restaurant. Not only did that time out perfectly, it got us close to our destination of North KC for the movie. It was also tasty food.

Spirited Away is a classic Miyazaki film, artistic and fanciful. It’s a children’s movie, which hasn’t stopped any adults from watching it. I’m a Miyazaki fan, so it was a good choice for my birthday weekend.

After that, we went to pick up my birthday present, which was an orange Sailor 1911 fountain pen which we got at discount barely used. I collect fountain pens, so I was happy with the present and happier with the price.

We were too full from lunch to eat a full dinner at Waldo Thai, so we decided to have appetizer and dessert at the Savoy, a restaurant in the 21c. Oh, my goodness! Imaginative and tasty food! They treated me special for my birthday and put us in the private, round room. They also discounted us our desserts.

Today we’re winding down and sitting at Broadway Cafe again while I write this. A lesson learned — go with the flow, as the results are better that way.

Considering Big Audacious Goals again

It’s my birthday eve-eve-eve

It’s three days before my birthday. I’m almost 59, or almost-almost 60, so I don’t have a “birth month” any longer. I have an extended celebration, bits and pieces here and there.

This last weekend my husband and I traveled to Kansas City, in part for a writing retreat and in part for my birthday. I got to see a Studio Ghibli double-feature and spend quality time in coffeehouses. We postponed the visit to the classic, elegant steakhouse until the future when we could get reservations in on time, but we ate Middle Eastern and Indian food.

My actual birthday is on Sunday. I’m expecting more coffeehouse time and maybe dinner at the local steakhouse (which is not as fancy as The Golden Ox in KC). Maybe a Kris and Kates’ Birthday Cake twister, although I’m off sweets right now.

Making Big Audacious Goals

What I really want for my birthday is a good day, a calm day with a little joy. A day with a little surprise, hopefully pleasant. Hugs and kittens. I don’t ask for much. Besides, Sunday is not a day for Big Audacious Goals to be met.

I will make the Big Audacious Goals for the next year on my birthday, because it seems to be the right time, avoiding the treachery of the New Year and the spookiness of Halloween. (There’s also Asian New Year and Rosh Hashanah to select from for New Year, if we want to get more complicated.) But instead of correcting bad things (resolutions) I’ll make Big Audacious Goals.

What are Big Audacious Goals? The name spells it out — they’re gutsy and magnificent and perhaps harder than we expect them to be. The idea is to use them to push ourselves beyond our notion of ourselves.

A Big Audacious Goal is best when it specifies the action you’ll make rather than the result you will get, because we have less power over what results from our actions. For example, writing this blog twice a week (which I have only done consistently lately) is a better BAG than getting 100 followers, which is something I have no control over. Coincidentally, I have over 100 followers. I didn’t get to my goal exactly, but close enough to celebrate.

Choosing Big Audacious Goals makes us feel more powerful, as if we have chosen something heroic to perform. I read somewhere that dogs define themselves by what they do: “Hank, fetch!” Now the dog’s name is Hank, fetch! I argue dogs become heroes in their own minds by what they do. We do too by adopting Big Audacious Goals.

What if you don’t succeed? It was a Big Audacious Goal; attempting it in the first place puts you a great deal better than before you adopted it. One of my BAGs was to indie-publish Gaia’s Hands, which I did. Not too many people have read it, though, which was the other half of the BAG (I should have known better). But look at the BAG of indie publishing it. Gaia’s Hands is a highly personal novel, and the one which I found hardest to write, so publishing it is a grand step. Putting it in front of readers, even if they don’t read it, is a grand step.

I don’t know what I’m going to adopt as Big Audacious Goals this year; I’m going to talk about that with my husband. Writing something I’d already planned for writing is not a BAG; the goal should be above the ‘do’ level and into the ‘dream, then do’ level. If it’s another book, it has to be something I think is beyond me. Maybe it’s doing something dramatic in marketing like better TikTok or a podcast (if only I had something to talk about!) A few cups of coffee and I’m sure it will come to me.

Happy Birthday Me

I don’t feel 58

Today I commemorate 58 years on earth. I don’t feel almost sixty; sIxty sounds — well, old. So does 58, for that matter. I don’t feel that old. if you had to ask me my age I’d say 45 (except for my knees, and then I’d say 80.) I’m old enough to be my students’ grandmother now (if they had two generations of young mothers). I still think I’m old enough to be their mother, and the reality hasn’t sunk in.

I feel like forty-five, only with a lot of memories. I don’t just remember mixtapes, I remember reel-to-reel tapes. I remember a sofa fountain in the drugstore. I remember princess phones in pink and the old bakelite black phones. I remember mainframe computers and DOS and the early days of NCSA Mosaic web browser at the University of Illinois (think the precursor of Netscape Navigator and Firefox.) I remember instamatic cameras and disposable cameras and the first digital cameras. I remember crying when the Beatles broke up. I remember unsafe playground equipment and Tonka trucks and Super Elastic Bubble Plastic. I remember going to the Woolworth’s lunch counter with my grandma and to the Ben Franklin 5 and 10 with my allowance to buy candy. I remember life before Applebee’s.

I don’t miss the past, really. It wasn’t that much simpler, and I like my technological toys.

How I plan to celebrate

It’s simple, really. I plan to play on my computer at the cafe and maybe have an ice cream soda from Kris and Kate’s for lunch. I plan to read my happy birthday greetings on Facebook and have dinner and a rare drink for my birthday.

It’s really not bad being 58.

Today is my 57th birthday.

Today is my 57th birthday. I tend to celebrate birthdays by making observations of the previous year, and this time is no different:

I don’t feel 57. I have the heart of a thirty-year-old. Unfortunately, I have the face and body of a 57-year-old.
Writing-wise:

I still have room to improve especially cover letters.
I have options: I can self-publish if I want.

World events:

I knew we were going to have a pandemic; I didn’t count on being this emotionally settled with it.
It truly seems as if the world I had grown up with: women’s rights, minority rights, gay rights — in other words, true equality — is crumbling. I need to find the right way to fight.

Personal life

I broke a curse that I had lived with all my life. I can’t explain it all here, but the situation had all of the hallmarks of a curse. End result: I accept that I am loveable as I am.
It’s really not bad being in one’s fifties — It makes me nervous that I’m closer to 60 than 50, and I can’t believe my high school graduation was almost 40 years ago.
I’m on a pretty even keel emotions wise, for which I am grateful.

In-between the disruption of COVID and the crimes of this political administration, beyond feeling overwhelmed by the changes in the world, the little crumbs of life are good — laughing with my husband, playing with Chloe the kitten, watching Poirot, interacting with students (as strange as it is with small classrooms and Zoom meetings).

Tonight I will go to dinner at William Coy’s with my husband and contemplate how I can make next year a better one.

Happy 56th birthday to me

Today I’m 56 years old.

This is not me. This is Belvedere the kitten, who’s 4 days old

For you younger people out there — time just chugs along and you hardly notice it until you get to one of those milestone years — 40, 50, 55. You’re too fixated on things like careers and children to wake up and think, “wow, I’m getting older.”

The grey hairs, the wrinkles, the thickening of the body come gradually, until you look in the mirror and see someone who looks older than you remember being.

You don’t even notice that the cultural touchstones — the music stars, the memes and jokes — flow and change around you, and you wake up one morning to find that the younger people around you don’t get your jokes anymore.

But you’ve survived so much! Everyday events that would panic you before — a flat tire, sleeping through the alarm — you now handle with aplomb. Your fears that you can’t handle crises have been proven wrong time after time.

And you have stories to tell. Middle age (late middle-age?) is a great time to start writing. Or find friends who like to tell stories and swap them.

When you’re older, you have the perspective of years, and that is your gift to the world.

Age as a symbolic construct: An iconoclast speaks

Today, I’ve chosen to talk about age as a symbolic construct in writing for two reasons:

1) I just watched the 35th anniversary directors’ cut of Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan yesterday. One of the running themes of this movie is aging, as experienced by the protagonist, Admiral James Kirk.

2) Today’s my birthday.

Aging symbolizes many themes and issues in writing. I won’t speak of absolutes here, but trends in what aging means in writing — and in society. I will illustrate with movies, because movies are fresh in my mind and they owe much of their genius (or lack thereof) to screenwriters:

— Mortality. In Wrath of Khan, James T. Kirk has been promoted to a desk job as Admiral. He can’t see as well as he used to and needs reading glasses. He collects antiques — in fact, he feels he himself as an antique until he becomes involved in a battle to the death with a brutal, yet also aging, nemesis.

— Agency. Armande Voisin, the curmudgeonly old woman in the movie Chocolat, has diabetes at a time when control of the disease was not as possible as it is now. Her daughter fusses over her, scolding Armande about what she eats. chiding her not to exert herself, and other well-meant but controlling acts. No spoilers here, but Armande finally wrests agency from her daughter in a delightful but shocking way.

— Attractiveness. According to the movies, we consider men more handsome when they’re older — Sean Connery as James Bond comes to mind. This may have something to do with the instrumental expectations of accomplishment expected from men, because older men outside of the spy industry (see Raging Bull) aren’t lauded for their attractiveness.

We consider women less attractive as they’re older — we find women in their thirties and forties who want to express their desirability to be suspect, and we term them “cougars” — the classic example of a cougar is Mrs. Robinson from The Graduate, who is portrayed as predatory and desperate. Women are expected to be sexless after a certain age, which is why Harold and Maude horrified so many people — an 80-year-old woman in a possibly sexual relationship with a much younger man — a boy, even?

I like to play with age in my stories, just as I like to send up other conventions of culture. In one of my stories, a seventy-five-year-old man becomes a shaman as a result of his totem chasing him halfway across the state. It’s never too late to make a change in your life, right? People will receive this as a heartwarming twist.

On the other hand, in my first book (currently under re-re-editing), a fifty-year-old woman falls in love with a 20-year-old man and vice versa. This is not idle wish fulfillment on my part for those of you who notice I fit in the woman’s age demographic; I wrote it because I wanted to play with the concept — what if the woman holds back because she’s afraid of being considered a cougar, and what if the man was the pursuer? In other words, not The Graduate? Even as I write this, I feel like I have to apologize about this, because I’m afraid you’re thinking “I can handle a semi-sentient vine and a woman with a plant superpower, but a twenty-year-old dating a woman three times his age?! That’s not believeable.” Magic is magic, and if it takes magic to elevate the status of older women, I’m willing to do the job — even if that novel never gets published.

So, I’m another year older, and I forgot the one other bit of symbolism that comes with age, and that is wisdom. Think Spock in the progression of Star Trek movies (old universe, not new universe). Spock goes from being a young, peculiarly unemotional crew member to an elder statesman and almost shamanic figure. Even older women possess this quality in literature as is evidenced by a long literary history of wise grandmother figures and fairy grandmothers.

I will leave you to consider what aspects of aging I consider as I celebrate my 54th birthday.

PS: A couple weeks before Leonard Nimoy (who played Spock in the original universe) died, he hopped onto Twitter to adopt nieces and nephews. No kidding — what a way to show agency on one’s deathbed. I was one of the nieces he adopted. I’m honored to be an honorary niece of Leonard Nimoy, who showed me how to age well.