On Friday I will turn 20, two decades, one-fifth of a century old. In the past few days I have been analysing my life and trying to determine what I can do to make my 21st trip around the sun better than the first 20. The only thing I can determine is that I should focus more on the task of making myself happy rather than trying to impress people and trying to fulfil superficial goals that will eventually end up not improving my happiness much.
Preperations for my 20th birthday haven’t been light. I spent most of last week and Monday this week worrying about my license renewal session. I was convinced that for some reason the DMV didn’t want me to drive in this state, but I eventually got over the feelings I was having and landed at the DMV on Tuesday morning. Just a routine renewal, read a line of text, and tell the little man what the little signs on the slides mean. For the first time I got them all correct on the first try. The picture on my new license is horrible, but I guess it will be ok, I will only have tht little card for 5 more years anyway ;-). In anticipation of turning 20 I began working on my personal website (in private, not live), but it will not be done in time. I think I am making good progress though (more than I have in the first year). The most anoying part of turning 20 is the need for a list of what I want for my birthday. When you are 20 the gifts don’t matter that much, especialyl when your environment is full of stuff that you barely use anyway. I have managed to come up with a minimal list to appease my mother and my aunt.
This birthday I feel like I am actually on-time for once. I remember my 17th birthday being a very sad day for me because of regrets that I held with myself. The primary regret was that I hadn’t obtained my license yet and that I was scared to do so. This year the only way I was able to get myself to go to the DMV was to get my father to go with me. Somehow having him around makes me feel less bad about myself. Last year my major conflict was the fact that I hadn’t made any major progress towards mentally preparing myself for college. Most of my birthdays in the past have been about regrets due to some milestone that I hadn’t handled, or something else like that.
My birthday seems to be pretty well planned out this year (Jon, I know you hate these, skip to the next paragraph). I am to get up at 9am, leave at 10am, go to Accounting and turn in my project, go to Calculus and retake the first test, then go to Business Programming and hear about the test, Finally for the academic day I go to Economics and stare blankly at a monotonous instructor. After class I will go through with some form of a plan which requires me to show up at my aunt’s house before I go with my family (and maybe a friend) to dinner. The rest of the evening after that is pretty much up to me… so we shall see, worst case scenario – I end up back at home with my pottery wheel and I spin the night away 😉 (hey, worst case doens’t always have to be bad).
The more I age, the more I don’t like it, but I don’t really have a choice, so I deal with it as best as I can. I want perfection in my life, but the more I experience life, the more I realize that will never happen. I have passed all of the ages for which I can be the youngest to do something amazing/heroic/noble, so that whole prodigial ship has sailed. This means that all universal goals I could hope to meet are no longer an option, but this doesn’t stop my personal goals for growth and achievement (read as: “learning more shit and finding things to waste time on”).
20 is coming very soon and in less than 48 hours I will no longer hold the title of “teenager”. For your personal amusement see http://curtis.kularski.net/countdown.