I turned 31 today. Yes I've been sitting on that prime joke for a solid year, and I'm frankly disappointed in myself for never thinking of it before.
Birthdays haven't been super exciting for a while, but last year with the big three-o I didn't really do anything out of sheer exhaustion from having literally just moved across the country and wrapping the production I was working on, so I wanted to do something just to acknowledge I've made it three decades in spite of myself. Myself and a birthday buddy did a joint celebration at a bar that's a favorite of his and did an open invite to some friends to join us. I expected we'd be there an hour and a half tops, but nearly five hours after getting there we realized it was waaaaay past our bedtimes and finally called it. It was nice to have a low key hangout like that, but there was an extra layer to it that I didn't expect.
It was nice to hang out with people who actually cared enough to put in the effort of coming out for something like that. Friendships get weird somewhere along the way in the journey into full adulthood, and I find that it's rare to just "hang out" anymore. There has to be some sort of purpose like games or movies, and even then it still has to be "easy". Place is more than 20 minutes away? Nah. Tired? Bail. Just don't like where it's at? Pass. In an age where everyone is busy constantly, deciding to carve out time for someone is a big deal. And I am suddenly very aware of that.
I'll be honest that I don't know where I'm going with this line of thought. Whether actively or passively, we all have an internal barometer for measuring our relationships with people, and that at certain points in our lives that recalibrates. I think I'm at one of those recalibration points and what is important to me in my relationships with people is changing. Granted, how I measure myself is also changing, so which one is following which I can't tell you. What I can tell you is life is vastly different than it was a year ago, which was already massively different from the year before. I still don't know where I'm heading, but it seems my compass is finally resetting to catch up to whatever it is.
Here's to another trip around our burning ball of gas!
Birthdays haven't been super exciting for a while, but last year with the big three-o I didn't really do anything out of sheer exhaustion from having literally just moved across the country and wrapping the production I was working on, so I wanted to do something just to acknowledge I've made it three decades in spite of myself. Myself and a birthday buddy did a joint celebration at a bar that's a favorite of his and did an open invite to some friends to join us. I expected we'd be there an hour and a half tops, but nearly five hours after getting there we realized it was waaaaay past our bedtimes and finally called it. It was nice to have a low key hangout like that, but there was an extra layer to it that I didn't expect.
It was nice to hang out with people who actually cared enough to put in the effort of coming out for something like that. Friendships get weird somewhere along the way in the journey into full adulthood, and I find that it's rare to just "hang out" anymore. There has to be some sort of purpose like games or movies, and even then it still has to be "easy". Place is more than 20 minutes away? Nah. Tired? Bail. Just don't like where it's at? Pass. In an age where everyone is busy constantly, deciding to carve out time for someone is a big deal. And I am suddenly very aware of that.
I'll be honest that I don't know where I'm going with this line of thought. Whether actively or passively, we all have an internal barometer for measuring our relationships with people, and that at certain points in our lives that recalibrates. I think I'm at one of those recalibration points and what is important to me in my relationships with people is changing. Granted, how I measure myself is also changing, so which one is following which I can't tell you. What I can tell you is life is vastly different than it was a year ago, which was already massively different from the year before. I still don't know where I'm heading, but it seems my compass is finally resetting to catch up to whatever it is.
Here's to another trip around our burning ball of gas!