Birthday Eve

I love birthdays. 

Maybe it is in the loving them too much, that this year, I was actually concerned about the planning and execution of this upcoming one. It could be that there was a party in Boston I never threw, or just the sheer adjustments that I'm still dealing with upon the move west and it's been so easy for birthdays to feel special because I had made them that way living so far from home. As a recompense for not being around for any of the family home traditions, I had created my own - and they were often spectacular.

New years (places, seasons) require new traditions. This has been making more and more sense as I've settled in better this year and have been thinking about "adult" things such as home-ownership and a long-term career. Now that I live in the west, birthdays can include family again, and in truth, that was one of the things I missed most while living so far away. There were more birthdays than I could count where I wasn't there to sign the card and sing at-the-top-of-your-lungs-off-key and eat mom's special just-for-the-b-day-person cooking and cake.

Some traditions need retiring, or were never actually traditions to begin with because in actuality they were an outlier. Although my birthday will be lovely every year, there simply are not enough island trips with sunrises or roommates/verydearfriends to support my lavish birthday habits. Looking back now, I needed those two very outlier-ish birthdays; they happened because of that need and in any other year they would seem lavish, but at the time, they literally were necessary to the circumstances of my life.

Often, I find myself collecting birthday thoughts after the fact, but this time I wanted to get this in tonight. Last year was a good year. I think because I'm still dealing with adjustment and pre-tenure stress, that these last two birthdays I've looked back and thought, "where is my perfect year?" because that's how 30 felt. But in reality, in this year I did amazing things like surf in Costa Rica, invest in some really wonderful relationships, deepen family ties, thrive in a setting I never thought I'd be, and explore (generally). Overall, I'm calling this year a win because in reality, it was.

Here's a thing I have decided: Years are what you make of them. There's not some superstitious happening that made the turning of 30 great; that birthday just happened to ride off of a year that happened to be downright terrible, and therefore the situation required the saving of that particular birthday. And so, I will sleep, and I will get up early. I will rock my class lecture because I know how to. There will be some office hours, meetings, maybe an offer on a house and some other random happenings. Ultimately, I will end up in a mini-staycation with my darling younger sister, and we will swim and eat and pretend we are from out of town. And in a way, it's perfect because this sister loves this kind of thing, and has never lived close enough to share a birthday with.

A final birthday note: I often set new years or birthday goals, or both. I am fairly certain that I haven't set defined ones that were successful for almost two years now. The ones I have set, have not been so much about trajectory as they have been about destination. Some advice I wasn't too terribly jazzed to receive, lauded the benefits of trajectory vs destination and cautioned me about how I get immersed in lists. Goals, lists, serve a time and place, and they work well for me, but still, the last two years my trajectory feels barely off, and I'd like to change that. Goals and lists are a thing that are so inherent to who I am, that I have a list from 1990's in my room complete with magazine cut outs, marker and middle-schoolerish handwriting. So I will still make goals, but this year, I'll try to be more mindful of trajectories instead of destinations, and I'll hold off with the making of them until January because I probably need a little more time.

And with that, here's to a new year. I've already decided it's going to be great regardless of what kinds of things it holds.