Birthday

Today, I am thirty-nine years old. I had hoped not to make a specific kind of post, one in which my limitations and failures to this point were taken into account. A good birthday party, cool presents, and fine company helped to soften things. Today, as I with conventional and unknowing mendacity said at my bar mitzvah, I am a man. A news story would read "A thirty-nine-year-old man..." I have not achieved very much for a "man"; I should be looking back on two decades of requited labors, instead of which I look back on a life lived as thinly and momentarily as the read head of a Turing machine. I am a grasshopper, soon to be outlived by ants.

I have been shown love and kindness and friendship and mercy, and for all these things I am grateful. But I wish I were better -- more independent, more self-sufficient, more productive. And I wish that I could make this happen before it became too late.