Too Much Meaning: How the millennial generation has horizons that are way too broad, too much education, and too much opportunity

There are more signs for internships, career fairs, student activity this-that-and-the-others, and plain old regular this-that-and-the-others than there are students at my college.

There's an opportunity, a cause, a celebration, something for every minute of every day, every person of every color, race, religious affiliation and bizarre sexual conglomeration imaginable. It's too much, and it's suffocating me.

Here's the careers I've considered so far:

• Professional musician
• Songwriter
• Copywriter
• Novelist
• Blogger
• Magazine writer
• Regular journalist
• Anthropologist
• Lawyer
• Mathematician
• Philosopher
• Philosophy professor (they're different)
• Cigarette taster
• Mendicant healer
• Mendicant peace warrior (think Gandhi)
• Homesteading farmer
• Commune member
• Politician
• Porn star (for like 30-45 seconds 2-3x a day)
• Teacher
• Professor (they're different)
• Public official
• Public intellectual
• Horticulturalist
• Robotics programmer
• Software designer
• AI expert
• AC expert (artificial consciousness; it's different)
• Math tutor
• Anointed One
• Memory competition champion
• Professional boxer
• Rabble-rouser
• Philosophical homeless man
• Philosophical homeless songwriter who sometimes rabble-rouses

There's more I know, but this is the semi-exhaustive short list. No, I take that back--this is the Official Semi-Exhaustive Shortlist (not short list; they're different). As you can see, they run the gamut from the completely reasonable to the completely ridiculous and fantastical. But I really considered all these things. And I am by no means a lunatic, at least not in this sense.

This phenomenon is everywhere: they're even considering adding a new Official Age Group. There used to just be "kid" and "adult," and you were somewhere between these two, or one or the other. Now, we have "child," "adolescent," and "adult"; adolescent has its own set of challenges and unique hormonal concoctions, and its own demographic group, TV shows, and ailments particular to it. Now my age group (those between, say, 19 and 27) may become another such developmental stage, characterized not by severe attitude issues and acne, but instead by an existential malaise endemic to this feeling of having too many options, or being paralyzed by options.

If this is another bourgeois trick designed to get us all to work in factories for $0.25 an hour, it's working. I'm really considering moving to Bangladesh or wherever the most horribly egregious sweatshop rights violations are taking place, just so I can have something to point to for a reason why I'm not Bill Gates yet.

I grew up in a pretty well-to-do family, I'll be honest. In fact, I'm still living there. (until the end of May; fingers crossed I can get a nice place in the ghetto next to the airport and a liquor store)

And it's driving me insane.

I'm tired of having every single show I could possibly want to watch play on a little $9,000 strip of plastic that's smarter than I am. I'm tired of Tweeting my every last thought. I'm tired of always being connected with everyone everywhere. I'm tired of hot showers and cold ice cream and security and safety and having it so good and all the responsibility that goes with that.

Well, I tell you what, Baby Boomers Who Taught Me Everything I Know: I hope every conceivable bad thing happens. I hope this great awesome life you've built for me all comes crumbling down and squishes all of you in the process.

I hope Osama bin Laden comes back from the dead and takes over the United States, impervious to our bullets now, being dead. I hope he institutes a reign of Zombie Islamic Fundamentalism and just kills everyone for no reason.

I hope all the tennis clubs burn to the ground, and every This Is a Zero-Tolerance No Bullying, Guns, Drugs, or Anything Else Fun Zone is filled with asphyxiating vaporized methamphetamine from a seventh-grader's locker, and school shooters are suddenly given all the power of policemen under Zombie Osama, and we all have to go running away with cloths over our mouths, but most of us end up coughing up all our teeth and self-respect and being forced to have nasty sex in a damp closet in federal prison anyway (these are the side effects of asphyxiating vaporized meth).

I hope Zombie bin Laden makes an alliance with Satan, and everyone has to move into concentration camps where everything is an infraction and you get tortured if you saved too much money at Wal Mart and Just Brakes last year.

I hope Harvard and St. Peter's Basilica start a nuclear war over evolution and we all have to live underground for 3,000 years in stasis because we ruined the Earth's atmosphere and have to wait for the radiation to dissipate. But the fundamentalists all bring their snakes and half of us die underground from snake bites because our faith wasn't strong enough.

I hope the President catches rabies and starts biting babies and golden retrievers. I hope the Secret Service all catch it and forget how to drive and his dumb motorcade goes flying off the road on the side of a mountain, all in a cloud of rabid mouth-foam and dismembered constituents.

... at least, if all this destruction was taking place, and the enemy was clearly outlined (I'm thinking Zombie Osama + Satan + Barack Obama and the Flying Rabies Babies), I'd know what the hell I'm doing here. I'd have a purpose other than my own stupid comfort and security. This is far preferable to having it great all the time and having nothing better to work for than the continuation of this same stupid cycle.

And while I wait for the world to end and for something interesting to thereby finally happen, I'll be moving into the ghetto, leaving my doors unlocked at night, going out of town frequently, and not asking anyone to watch my house. I'll be eating food I drop on the floor, partying a little too much, sleeping on other people's couches, hitchhiking, going to festivals I can't afford, and in general not planning for the future or doing anything the right way at all.

And if, after all that risky behavior, nothing bad has happened, or I haven't yet found the thing I was put here to do battle with, I may just burn down my house. For fun.

Coffeeshops: The Good, the Bad, and the Pretty

So I've decided to skip class today and sit in a coffee shop and do homework. By which I really mean sit and goof off and stare at the three pretty girls also in here (I will learn after this story ends that they all work here, but for the time being, they're lounging and look like customers. Guess the shift hadn't started? I dunno), and write blog posts about it. I'm accomplishing little.

But how many times do you walk into a coffee shop with your tobacco pipe (stop laughing; it's for tobacco) and a laptop and find yourself getting anything significant done? Only the rarest and most sanctified occasions.

All this is aside the point, however. I'm here to talk about the pretty girls.

I really want to walk up and talk to these girls, and I even read a few things on Zan Perrion's "Natural Game" / How to Be a Metaphorical Pirate Online Forum about 'approaching women' and 'dealing with rejection,' &c.

Don't ask me how I found myself surfing Zan Perrion's "Natural Game" / How to Be a Metaphorical Pirate Online Forum, or why I'm fraternizing with pickup artists, however new-agey and Whole Foods-wholesome they may seem.

Okay, I can't insult the forum with any seriousness. It's actually full of genuine people. Their only goal is to form honest connections with the women around them (both spiritual and physical, I'm sure...), and a few of them write posts that fairly sparkle with glimmers of Enlightenment and equanimity.

But I'll never admit I had to go on the Internet to look up how to talk to women. Never, ever, ever. At least not in public.

Even so--Internet knowledge or no Internet knowledge--rather than apply any of the things I learned among the gurus of the carnal, I elect to sit, pretend to type on my laptop, and stare. Waving my fingers around above my computer keyboard while staring off in a different direction is obviously the best way to affect nonchalance. ... right?

(Let's focus on the brunette about twenty feet away from me, for the purposes of this story (it's a big coffee shop). But to be sure, this story happens in myriad ways in myriad places, often to me and probably all over America.)

I sneak a peek up from my laptop. She's on a computer, too. Sweet: something in common. She knows people who work here. Shit: she's more comfortable here than I am.

So I breathe deeply, try to meditate for a moment, but instead start attempting to craft a smooth opening line.

Say what you want about my ability to write (or my own perception of my ability to write--often two very different things), but that ability does not translate well to inventing pickup lines. I find myself on Google, loathing every ounce of my own flesh for doing it, pulling up Zan Perrion's "Natural Game" / How to Be a Metaphorical Pirate Online Forum, desperately grasping at the last of my will to "approach."

Paranoia kicks in, and I start to worry someone will see that I'm on this site. They'd surely find a way to make sure that the entire world made fun of me forever if somebody saw me on a pick-up artist site. How lame could he possibly be? they'd think. LOL x infinity, and the joke is on me.

Props to you gentlemen at the Metaphorical Pirate Forums for your confidence in not only approaching but also in being open about the fact that you sometimes need a website to help you approach oh-so-pretty, and yet so-scary, women.

So I fill my tobacco pipe, making extra-distinguished and extra-visible (yes! I'll get major manly points for this!) use of my new $3 pipe tool from Mr. G's Tobacco Shop and Good Old Boy Hangout in my hometown (it's the most intimidating place in the world to walk into: all the guys who never do anything but sit around the store smoking cigars just stare at through wreaths of aromatic smoke and judge you for not being 70), and stroll outside to use my cell phone to get the motivation and feel-good fuzzies I seem to think I need to go talk to this girl. The opportunity to surreptitiously stare through the window at my Sweet Brunette (with whom I am by this time unabashedly and sickeningly in love) definitely helps with my decision.

I walk back and forth outside, feeling both quite invisible and strangely watched. Both feelings seem to emanate from my Sweet Brunette's direction, so I'm afraid to even look towards her. I suddenly feel ridiculous smoking a pipe, and start to wonder how I can escape this situation and not feel like a Chinese eunuch (nothing against the Chinese, but those eunuchs have no balls, man).

But there is no escape. I've had the thought, and like you can't un-see your parents doing it as you stand innocently in the doorway three years old, you can't un-think these thoughts. I'm faced with a decision. I can either suck it up, toss the pipe into the bushes and head inside with purpose, and wait to sink or swim, or I can suck it up, stop pretending I'm mini-Casanova, and go back to my laptop and my assigned articles (which, for the record, are still not done).

I head back inside, tail noticeably between my legs. I bet even my Sweet Brunette notices (pity sex? my reptilian brain perks up. I shiver a bit and try to avoid remembering that that thought ever crossed my mind...).

I open my laptop, and decide in honor of the Dalai Lama that I'll take the Middle Way. I'll neither go back to my assigned articles nor go talk to her! What a genius am I! I shall write about it. I shall turn my fast-enveloping existential malaise as my Sweet Brunette packs her things and begins to head out the door into beautiful art. At least then my failure shall not have been in vain. It shall have been worth it.

... right?

These are the Tales of My Sextual Conquests

Sexting is awesome.

Here's why.

I used to have this girlfriend, and her name was Sam. She hated sexting. She told me this once, ironically through text message. This got me to thinking. So I asked her,

Me: What color are your eyes?

Her: What?

Me: What color are your eyes, I said.

Her: This is a text. You don't have to repeat yourself. What do you mean?

Me: Just answer the question.

Her: Brown.

Me: That's how I sext. Lol. I am hilarious.

Her: Wow. That was so awesome, I think I just came.

Me: OMG SAM STOP SEXTING ME THAT IS SO GROSS.

It was truly a moment of triumph and, in retrospect, not a story I'm sure why I shared. Anyway, I'm looking for other good sextual conquests, and feel free to comment with your own. And the definition of sextual conquest is, by the way, completely up to you. There just has to be some element of a 'win,' so to speak. So losing your sexting virginity doesn't count (I think I still technically have mine actually, unless you actually do count the above exchange). Anyway, I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Concerning "From the Desk of the Lieutenant Colonel"

I want you all to meet a character I created in response to something I happened to read (summary below if you roll fast and loose).

The Washington Post does the story one-sentence justice: "The Pentagon is considering awarding a Distinguished Warfare Medal to drone pilots who work on military bases often far removed from the battlefield." 

I thought the idea of giving a medal to a drone pilot exceptionally silly. Outstanding bravery and honor are not owed them.

Because flying a drone is  more like playing a video game. But this is a video game whose NPCs are not NPCs at all, but RLPs with FHCs (Real Live People with Families, Homes, and Children).


And so I created the Lt. Col. (Ret.) S. Patrick Cunningham.

The Plight of the Dog, pt 1

The dog came from the wolf, and became a friend to man many thousands of years ago. The wolf came to man and offered its nose, which man gladly took and used for his benefit. In return, man extended to the wolf the benefits of civilization and domestication: the wolf agreed to surrender its liberty and become the docile dog.

Man, of course, still faintly feared the wolf, even in its new form as the dog, and kept the dogs chained like slaves. But the wolves honored their agreement and remained dogs.

At first, man was perhaps justified, too, in keeping his new companions in fetters--their wildness still came out frequently, and they took to civilization slowly, if at all. Many began to question man, and some openly rebelled, seeking to return as wolves to the wild. This they could not do, for they were bound by their agreement, and so they struggle as half-dog, half-wolf, perpetually confused in their wanderings and always wondering at their confusion, deeply aware that they have betrayed their natures.

Man grew to trust the dogs, and came to love them of their own accord, as man always does in response to service rendered selflessly. The dogs for their part held to their agreement, and by and large committed themselves to learning the art of domestication from man. They learned to distinguish the territories of man's camps, and who were his enemies. The dog always felt great joy in announcing the approach of potentially unfriendly strangers. Every being likes to do best that for which it is most suited, and the dogs had taken form to fulfill a specific need. And so they were joyful.

Many men, as well, struggled with domestication, as they do to this day. Many, like the half-dogs that had tried to return to the wild contrary to the terms of their agreement, felt within themselves the lie of their domestication, so much better suited for wild life were they. And strangely enough, these many among men still tried to suppress their wild constitution, frequently to little avail. And so, dogs and humans alike showed their diverse natures. The civilized dogs learned to stay indoors most of the time, and enjoy the finer comforts of life, learning to love bathing and stylish haircuts, like their most civilized human companions. The wilder of the dogs and the wilder of the humans lived also very similarly, but their lives often retained those aspects of the wild that their personalities and caninities could not shed: they remained brutish and ignorant creatures, proud in their defiance but yet unreasoning in their opposition and hatred.

And so man tried to learn how to live, and the dog faithfully copied him in every way, learning to absorb his ways of thinking and acting.

The dog called Scion was born late in the age of the Contract between man and dog. Man had grown very civilized indeed, ceasing almost to even use his limbs, so powerful were his external machinations. In a testament to the goodwill and compassion of mankind, they continued to honor their agreement to offer succor and fealty to their dog companions, though the age of any need for their services was long past. The dogs, poorly understanding why they remained in their agreement with mankind, continued to announce impending danger and keep their noses alert for prey, but much of the joy had vanished from it. Somewhere inside they knew that they no longer performed the service for which they existed, and they felt together the restlessness and sadness of their human companions, likewise robbed of their rightful place in nature, and all quite by accident.

Scion was born an orphan, raised on human refuse, perpetually dodging the roving Animal Control gangs that patrolled Macedon City. He lived among his companions, and their bones showed through their fur and skin.

Scion grew a bit apart from his puppyhood friends, however, and discovered within himself a desire for an indescribable something. He spent more time watching his friends fight and play (a line often blurred in a day's escapades) than he did fighting or playing. He knew something was wrong. He knew that his friends were somehow meant for more than this. But he did not know how to express what he felt, or from whence the feeling came.

He heard rumors among the city rats of dogs who lived outside the city, having reclaimed, the rats said, their wildness. Scion heard this with great joy, and resolved to find a way to escape the city and live among the wild dogs.

The stories that he heard told of how the wild dogs always held the Grand Hunt on hot afternoons, exerting themselves to exhaustion to vanquish some proud and terrible beast, then gorging themselves to sleep. He felt fear, but he knew that if the wild dogs could rise from their squalid conditions and come to live as he felt they must be meant to live, that he could also. He yearned for the satisfaction of his soul's deepest desires. The wolf living within him grew famished and wild, and sought to be expressed in his caninity.

His friends heard of his plan, and came to stop him. They said that he would be caught by Animal Control leaving the city, and disappear into one of the penitentiaries set up for stray dogs like themselves. They told him how the place and condition of his birth was evidence of the will of man and his God, that if anything else had been willed for him, it would already have happened. He listened to these arguments, and felt the fear in his heart rising as they affected his mind. But as time wore on, and he spent his days running from dumpster to dumpster, fighting with his friends over morsels of food, and dodging City Animal Control, the thought of the wild life never left his mind. He thought about it all day, every day, trying to walk and act as if he were already among the wild dogs. He imagined their noble natures, their strict adherence to their tribal codes, and even created elaborate visions of wars between races of wild dogs, always resulting in the glory of the strongest and most powerful--perhaps not incidentally always his tribe, as well.

Finally, in the middle of the night, he woke from a troubled sleep no longer willing to stay in the city among his childhood friends. He knew in his heart that he would no longer accept conditions as they were, and that it was time for him to move on. He swallowed his fear, his incredible ignorance, and sternly commanded silence from the nagging voice of fear within, and started walking towards what he thought must be the city limits. As if manifested directly from a nearby wall, an Animal Control agent rounded the corner. Scion panicked, and turned tail. Animal Control saw him, grinned, and sprinted after him, net in hand. Scion heard behind him the hoarse breath of the thundering Animal Control man, and heard a high-pitched clacking as he fired off his taser in drooling anticipation of the coming takedown.

Scion pelted faster and faster, ears, tail, and shaggy coat bouncing and trailing like the loose ends of robes as he swerved between alleyways, hoping to evade and lose the agent.

He winced as he heard how very close behind him the man's taser cracked again. He could almost feel the white-hot touch of the electric coil, saw in his mind's eye the apathy that had invaded the eyes of the friends he had lost to Animal Control, and felt the pain of running begin to vanish from his body. He felt himself beginning to give up.

The man tripped. Not enough to fall, but enough that his stride was broken. His long net scraped against a wall behind Scion, who took the opportunity to duck in the opposite direction down a small alleyway, and thence through a tiny opening in the walls into what appeared to be an abandoned human tenement home. He heard the man reaching behind him, trying to catch the end of his tail or trip him with the net. Scion's nails scuffed against the linoleum floor onto which he fell, and he half-ran, half-slid on this new and confusing surface until his left front shoulder collided with the opposite wall.

He could still hear the man struggling to push the opening wider behind him and follow him through the hole. He looked around him in a panic, not sure where he was or how to escape. He saw an open doorway and sprinted through it, sliding underneath a couch wrapped in plastic and panting. He could hear the man faintly behind him, his shouting and pushing at the tiny opening the wall growing fainter as he lost resolve. Eventually, all was silent. Scion lay, stretched and still panting, underneath the couch wrapped in plastic, and thought about his friends.

But instead of feeling them vindicated, he felt now that he could never go back to them. He was on the path now, like it or not, and there was no way but forward.

So, when he had trained his nose on the wind outside the hole in the wall and found it lacking the portents of human approach, he headed forth again into the slow dawn to find the way out of Macedon city.

What I Would Do If Almost Nobody Had a Million Dollars

I'm a college student. Among other things, of course: who wants to be so defined by a single activity that a simple bad test grade can ruin your whole semester?

But as a college student, however far from the mass of my fellow neophytes and Padawans I may style myself, I'm subject to certain unavoidable conditions. Like textbooks.

Consider for example my trigonometry class. We talk about the Pythagorean theorem. It underlies almost everything we do. cos^2(x) + sin^2(x) = 1. a^2 + b^2 = c^2.

The best part is this: this subject hasn't changed in hundreds, sometimes thousands of years. The Pythagorean theorem is 2,500 years old. It predates the Indo-Arabic numeral system we use to talk about it.

Why then, the inquisitive mind wonders, do we publish new textbooks on trigonometry almost every single year? Is there somewhere I can read about the latest news and trends in the field of trigonometry? I'll go ahead and answer one of these for you: no such place exists, because no such news transpires. Basic trignometry hasn't changed and isn't changing, now or for the forseeable future.

But the likes of Pearson and Prentice Hall beg to differ. For the textbook bonanza neophyte, these are the companies that manufacture my textbooks. There are others--but I'm writing on the fly here and those are the first that pop into my head.

Here's how it works. The university system, wanting to deliver ever-greater value to justify skyrocketing tuition costs, insists that professors assign only the highest-quality and latest-edition textbooks. And in all other spheres, 'latest edition' means the most edits, the best translation, or the latest and most streamlined incarnation of a given author's lofty thought. In all other spheres.

In the textbook world, this has come to have a quite different meaning. There's no significant improvement from the 2nd edition of my calculus textbook to the 14th.

Unless Newton and Leibniz are risen to instruct us from beyond the grave in advanced mathematics, and have changes they'd like to make to calculus, or unless there's some serious research going on at Pearson into new mathematical concepts and models we just haven't been told about, these textbooks change for backwards reasons. They put out new editions because the college system continues to assign them. I can't exactly blame them: it's a pretty lucrative gig.

Information that's free on Google costs $300 per leaden tome at your average XYZ University. Why?

Misuse of copyright laws. Math problems don't belong to anyone, least of all the shady operator who rearranges them by number in the textbook to ensure all new students have to buy the new textbook. Math concepts belong to any one person even less. Out with that paradigm: it's unadulterated B.S.


What to do about all this? Fight the power, obviously. Here's how.

Starting this summer, I'll be creating a project. I'll be collecting textbooks from across the nation, starting with mathematics and branching out o all subjects eventually. I will be posting for free all of the information and problems in all of the new textbooks assigned to college students that year. So, once this project is up and running (check back in June), there will no longer be a need for math students--and eventually for any student--to buy textbooks. They'll be available online, for free, as soon as they're released. I'll also be creating a donation fund to which you can contribute if you so desire to help with textbook acquisition, overhead costs, and, in all likelihood, the legal fees we'll incur when Pearson and Prentice Hall come rampaging up Court Summons lane to 'take back what's theirs.' (translation: protect the paradigm of naked theft which they propagate)

Wish me luck.

I Hate My Birthday

I was born almost exactly 23 years ago. Give or take about 9 hours, as of this writing (though not necessarily of this posting), I slid forth and plopped unceremoniously onto sanitary sheets covering a hospital bed and was promptly slapped by a doctor. I'd like to claim I slapped him back, but I probably didn't.

(I'm glad not every day begins with such violence.)

Which brings me to today. Happy birthday to me, Mr. Rogers, and Spike Lee, and thanks to Rogers and Lee for adding more significance to my 'special day.' But let's start at the beginning: birthdays make no sense and I hate them.

There's never a moment's peace on one's birthday. I don't mean inquisitive relatives who develop a sudden but passing interest in my health and well-being, and always consider opinions on my life decisions the best present for a birthday boy--though they're by no means birthday-rage panacea.

I mean the inner turmoil between the 12 year-old girl inside me screaming Attention please! Where's my damn party?! and the grumpy old man insisting This is meaningless, and you're an idiot if you care about it.

This internal 12 year-old sobbed this morning that I didn't wake to find 500 of my closest friends bedecked in streamers and party hats welcoming the dawn with me. And she threw a tantrum when I unlocked the door of my office this morning and found that no one had decorated anything in my honor. Google did not change its front page to a silly drawing resembling me or something representing me. God dammit.

Then, on the other hand, every time my internal 12 year-old (let's call her Lily) foments her unreasoning tumult, my internal grumpy old man (let's call him Herbert) waxes self-righteous, insisting that birthdays from a logical perspective are quite meaningless, and under no circumstances to be celebrated, commemorated, or used as an excuse for anything but complete self-effacement.




Lily.
Where's my party? Where are my friends? Don't any of them care at all that I'm older now? I'd like to celebrate. Let's make today all about me: I won't do anything I don't want to do, or feel bad about anything that happens, and I'll be around my friends and they'll all celebrate me and we'll get drunk and have a fantastic time today and I'll wake up tomorrow refreshed, empowered--ready to take on the world. But today has to be perfect or my entire year will suck. Today is a microcosm of my entire year.

Wait--where is everybody? Why is the world still spinning? Doesn't anybody realize IT'S MY BIRTHDAY?

Today sucks. (cries)

  Herbert.
This is ridiculous. She really thinks everyone should just stop everything they're doing and just pay attention to her? Who the hell does she think she is? The Queen of Spain? The Queen's expectations would be lower!

There's too much to be done to fritter my time away with unnecessaries. Let's focus on making money today, and getting things done. I'll 'celebrate' when things are looking up. Now is the time to buckle down, power through, and celebrate when life looks little brighter.

Today is a Wednesdsay. That's the primary context of my day. I'm not 16; this day no longer means anything. It's stupid, stupid, stupid. The sooner Lily shuts up, the better.


Lily.
But what about meeeeeeeee? What about my feelings? I want to feel important and loved. My friends love me; my family loves me. Or at least, they should. And they should show it!


Herbert.
I don't go around losing my mind on other people's birthdays, and there's no reason why anyone else should do so for mine. The last thing I want is a bunch of people running around trying to make sure My Special Day is just perfect: that's a recipe for unhappiness. Be content with what you have, and focus instead on what can be done today, how I can get ahead today. Thinking about this anymore is just a waste of time.


Lily.
No one is paying any attention to the fact that it's my birthday! Nobody seems to care. Why do I have to work today? Or do anything, for that matter? Everyone else gets parties and love on their birthdays, and people buy them drinks and presents and all the things I want all day every day. No one loves me. (cries more)



Both make good points, I think. And it's hard to decide who I really like better. Herbert seems reasonable and grounded, but Lily appeals to the childlike wonder of the world and the need for significance and love that I'm convinced defines human existence.

The dialogue stops here. You can make up your own back and forth if you'd like, and it probably will well represent what's happening in my own psyche. But this dialogue for me is quite inescapable. It goes on all day, starting in fact a few weeks before my Special Day and continuing, Lily slowly losing her petulant potency and Herbert losing his cynicism, until about March 26th. Good God I must be insufferable this week.

I don't know whether I want to make today a special day, and plan out huge activities and blow a lot of money I don't have, or whether I can commit to complete detachment from this day.

The pressure from the people around me--everybody just keeps telling me what to do (have a happy birthday)--created this internal turmoil, and now I'm left to reconstruct my internal clarity. Thanks a lot, guys. Have a stressed and regular ole birthday today, my Late Piscean brothers and sisters. With an attitude like that, you're sure to see any good happenings today for what they are: moments for which to be grateful. Start at zero: expect nothing.

This detachment will give you the fortitude to withstand the intense external pressure to take only good things on your birthday, or to somehow transcend your workaday neuroses in favor of a birthday-inspired Enlightenment and peace. F those ideas. Make your own. Let's hear what unusual thing you're planning for yours.

As for me? Give me a regular old good day with warm weather, serene friends and co-workers, and no pressure.

... and give me liberty or death, while you're at it. These are the best presents for which I could even aspire to ask.