Lordy, Lordy, Guess Who's A Tired Cliché

I begin this birthday in much the same way I began the original forty years ago this very hour:  completely naked and a little wet.  (I just got out of the shower.  Let that little mental image fester in your brain box for a while.  I'll wait.  Good, now we're both awkwardly uncomfortable.)

Now for a more serious note:  I never honestly thought I'd live to see forty.  However, as fate would have it, I am not a Knower of All Things, and so for the time being I'm still here and ticking.  (My wooden bedside table was just sufficiently knocked.)

While my Life has not lived up to Younger Me's expectations, it has led me to places I would never have dreamed of going back in my more idealistic youth.  I do occasionally lament what "might have been" when I open my Facebook and see so many lives playing out that I sometimes (always) envy, but had I gone down that supposedly more traditional path (in itself an illusion of perception of some supposed ideal that we fool ourselves into believing) I would have completely missed the, ahem, "uniqueness" that is the person I have become.  In fact, there will never be another quite like this.  I mean, just look at me, yo.  This shit is special.  Y'all better recognize!  (The 90's called while I was writing this and demanded its sassy attitude back.  I quickly complied before I started snapping in a vaguely z-shaped formation.)

My point, now that I have finally arrived at one, is that this adventure of Life is never at all what we plan.  I'm older now than I have ever been, but in some ways I feel that my journey has really just begun.  It is a strange duality to be older, yet still in many ways a learner.  I often get amazed when someone looks up to me like I'm this sage adult, when in my heart I still feel like a kid myself.  It probably doesn't help that I make my own sound effects and like to have mock sword fights in the Walmart toy aisle.  (Dude, a Topher's gotta Toph.)

Age, as we often tell ourselves when sucking in our gut while looking forlornly at our naked forms in the mirror, is merely a number.  This is true.  A very precise and accurate number, as it turns out.  I'm less than thrilled at my current odometer reading. 

That being said, I'm forty.  I'm gonna own it.  I'm still here, and I'm actually kind of excited to see where this adventure takes me next.  Because truthfully?  I wouldn't change a damned thing that has happened so far.  I am the person I am today because of these experiences. 

And I actually am starting to kinda like that person.