Today Is My Birthday

Today is my birthday. I'm 32 years old today. I remember wondering, as a kid, what it would be like to make it this far in life, and what my life would be like. I don't know if I had any concrete ideas of what it might be like, but I doubt my life as it currently stands even entered my mind. My 7 years as an umpire, going to the University of Chicago for a year before transferring back to OU, heading to grad school for linguistics then leaving it, going into computers, a career in networking and information security, two kids, divorce...

I remember some of my dreams back then. I always loved space and airplanes, so I wanted to be an astronaut. Then, when I realized that I'd never be an astronaut because of my eyes, I wanted to be an astronomer ("what better way to spend my life than by looking at the stars all day?" I reasoned). In junior high, I became attached to physics and so I wanted to be a physicist. I reached college, and my dreams changed again; a lack of aptitude for calculus killed my dream of becoming a physicist, and I had discovered the joys of umpiring anyway. My marriage dashed my dreams of going into the minors (and hopefully, the majors) to umpire. My dreams were toning down, though; my last dream was to become a linguistics professor, preferrably with either classical or Native American languages for research. Alas, how quickly our dreams die...

Whatever dreams or plans I had back then, they almost certainly don't resemble what my life has become. We have all of these grandiose plans and schemes, especially when we're young, but there are just so many unforeseen things that take us off the track we thought we were taking. And how different the very concept of dreams is to me now; before, my dreams were where I was going, what I was doing, larger-than-life constructs that were resultant from the limitlessness of my future possibilities. Now, they're merely dreams, things or situations that would be nice to have but that aren't something I expect to achieve. I guess I AM getting older.

Thanks for reading along.