Happy to have a proper weekend.

Last Saturday, around this time, I was working with my team on an important upgrade at work that included server and client upgrades, which in turn meant logging into individual workstations and performing a bunch of repetitive steps. It didn’t turn out as planned, and the process was (and still is) riddled with problems that are still affecting us.

A little later that same morning, I decided to take a break and walk over to the local Saturday farmer’s market. It’s about 40 minutes to 1.5 hours of walking, depending on how fast I want to go (there’s a park in the way, and I enjoy going through its paths).

I’m glad I ended up making myself take that walk. Work was pressing, but we got to a certain standstill, and I grabbed the chance and used the incoming blizzard as an excuse to get groceries. That walk, which was the shortest one I ever took to the market, made all the difference. I need my walks.

One of the things I determined to do after the weekend ended and our upgrade project started to derail into the following Monday morning was to pay more attention to my personal projects. It sounds so easy, written here in Emacs on a new Saturday morning, while water is boiling (duh!) coffee is brewing, but it’s not. I think that for some of us, work is just a different kind of drug.

What also came out of that decision was to plan my birthday as an event for the first time, I believe, in my entire life.

As a kid, my birthdays were taken care of by my parents or teachers to some extent. Growing up, this was always a headnod kind of event, maybe an excuse to take a day off for myself. This year, however, the number of friends and partners around me, combined with my family (who apparently enjoyed my grumpy company on our recent trip to Disneyland), who also wanted some JTR time, made me realize I need to organize the birthday as a thing. There were simply too many people.

To some of you, this is no big deal - but I assure you, this antisocial hermit who writes in front of you knows nothing of such things. At best, he goes to some small gathering at a friend’s event.

So I did what the cool kids do these days and downloaded Partyful (don’t worry, I planned the whole thing on Emacs as well). Finding a place to eat and a place to drink was easy, and my birthday this year falls on a weekend, which helped. A little bit of calling to these venues reminded me that, in a very normal New York manner, no one takes your reservations seriously so far in advance, and that I’m expected to call a week beforehand, if not just a day prior. What was left was to poke and ask, and I was surprised to see that so far everyone wants to show up, even those who need to travel a bit extra or even take a day off.

I’m humbled by this. I don’t understand how I got to this point of having such a number of caring people in my life, both friends and more intimate partners1. It’s not shocking in the sense of “what the hell happened,” because of course, I know these people and spent time with them, and we keep in touch, so the outcome is that they’d like to show up, logically speaking. But logically speaking is one thing, and emotionally understanding (is there such a thing?) is another.

More than just a birthday or a social event though, to me it’s yet another hallmark of my personal life. I’ve built myself up and improved to the point where I can do this: invite people to an event I’m planning and have enough people to do it with. Some are born with this ability, others gather it naturally in their teen years, but for me, this wasn’t even a struggle in the past: it was just nothing before. An empty space without a definition.

A bit of this has to do with accepting who I am and what people I want to have around me as a result. Again, this sounds simple, but it’s not. A recent self-recording of myself venting and then analyzing just that took about a week of self-reflection, and apparently I still am largely clueless. It’s a work in progress that never stops.

Well then. Here’s to some fun to be had? Hmm.

Footnotes

1 : I don’t really separate those. On a spectrum of friendship, when someone becomes close, they can also become intimate. There’s no line in the sand drawn to define where the “friendship zone” ends and that of a more intimate partnership begins; each relationship is different because each person is different.