Collin Vs. Blog

Having come far enough along in the writing of this weblog, I find now that I am less interested sometimes in producing new™ and exciting™ content on a given day than I am in reading past entries for the particular day in question.

Case in point. Today, in search of a little birthday inspiration, I went browsing back back back, where I (re)learned what happened on this day in history, reflected on positive and negative freedom, and contemplated the artifice that is the birthday. Busy busy fella. And see, already, just in the process of recounting past birthday blogical triumphs, I'm all ready to rip out a big old birthday essay for your reading pleasure™.

Okay, so maybe not. But I will do more than backlink my birthday posts.

This is my birthday tale for this year. Back back back in the day, like high school back back back, I once knew a girl, a couple of years younger than I was. When you're in high school, though, calendar years are like dog years, and two or three years is like forever. So it would have probably been riding the fine edge of appropriateness at the time, I suppose, to admit that I had a crush on her. Not that it really mattered. Her family moved away, I moved on to college soon enough, and we lost touch.

Flash forward to the present day, where she's sitting at work one day, and decides to throw my name into Google and to see what pops up. This blog, among other things. And she sends me an email, I reply, and before you know it, I'm ringing in my day of birth with a three-hour phone call, where I learn about her marriage (and divorce), three kids, a life that's been even more nomadic than my own, and all sorts of stuff besides. I suspect she'll be reading this entry at work later today.

So the moral of my birthday tale is that, at a time in my life where it's felt like my ties have weakened in general, where I'm prone to pity over the fact that I'm cruising up on the "new thirty," and where I'd planned on "celebrating" by doing nothing in particular, I celebrated instead by renewing a friendship that I lost so long ago that I'd even lost the fact that it was lost. That's not too shabby, as far as gifts go, not too shabby at all.

So enjoy today; it's on me.