Once More, Around The Sun

I turned 26 on Sunday and it isn't quite sitting well with me.  My biological clock has started ticking.  Not THAT biological clock... I definitely don't want any spawn running around.  It's more akin to the mid-life crisis bell that tolls for men.  The chime of "What have I done with my life and why didn't I do it better, and, dammit all, why don't I have more money and a better car?"

Like this one.

I feel like I can't possibly be this close to 30, like I've misplaced some years somewhere.  I occasionally get the feeling that I've been driving to a party, but I've gotten horribly lost and, now, by the time I get there, the party will be over and the only people left will be the cleaning crew.  Sorry.  That's remarkably depressing.

Here's a picture of a giraffe licking a squirrel.

I know 26 is still young, but I feel so old.  I know that comes mostly from where I work.  I'm a permanent fixture, standing next to a revolving door of teenagers and college students.  This is their after-school or Spring Break job.  They stay for a while, then go back to school or off to better employment.  At this point, I barely know anything about any of them.  I know it sounds callous, to be so uninterested in the people I see on a daily basis, but I can't really get attached to any of them.  They'll eventually leave, some sooner than later, to pursue their big life plans and achieve their big life goals.  Or, at the very least, they'll leave to get trampled on by their big life plans and big life goals.  But none of them have resigned themselves to the tedium of staying forever.  Not that I have, exactly, but I just don't have the desire to start over somewhere new.  I don't want to be in my current job forever, or even for that much longer, but I do want to stick with this company.  What I have resigned myself to, though, is the menial jobs of the uneducated masses.  I never went to college and never got any sort of useful degree.  I bounced around community college for a time until, by sheer luck, I managed to take the correct combination of classes to acquire an AA in Theatre, which is essentially an application for employment in the retail and/or food service industry.  And that's fine.  I mean, someone's got to do those jobs and it may as well be a person who didn't spend thousands of dollars and countless hours pretending that I was ever going to do something better with my life.

So... here I am.  Twenty-six years old, with a job that a trained chimp could do.  And I accept that as my fate.  But that doesn't mean I can't accomplish things.  See... I'll bet you thought this entry was going to be entirely morose.  But this is the part where I try to exude the optimism with which I am surrounded by my young co-workers.  I have a bucket list of sorts.  Except, instead of it being a list of things I'd like to do before I die, this is a list of things I've always wanted to do if I wasn't too fat to do them.  And, seeing as how I am steadily becoming less fat, it would appear that I need to get started on my list.  At the top of my list is the goal I put in my very first entry, the goal for which this blog is named: be able to wear a Slave Leia bikini to Comic-Con.

Also on the list are various sporting activities of the air and sea.  In the air category, I would love to go sky diving.  To a lesser extent, I'd like to go bungee jumping and hang gliding, but sky diving is an absolute must.  On the water side, as a life-long Californian, I feel I must learn how to surf.  Once I have mastered that, or, at least given it a sincere effort, I'll try water skiing.  And, at some point, I will play with a jet ski.  I only have one activity on solid ground planned for my future and it's one I have previously mentioned: running a marathon.  It will happen... I write, as I finish off a beer.

Beer: because it's better for you than soda

Alcohol intake notwithstanding, I do plan on accomplishing these things.  I may be older and more cynical than most of the people at work, but I haven't totally lost my optimism.  I still feel weird about being on the upper side of my twenties and I do find the course of my life somewhat disappointing, but I guess you just have to work with what you've got and do the best you can. I guess the point I'm trying to make here is one that has been made by a group of men far more eloquent than I.  Ladies and gentlemen, Monty Python: