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in less than 15 more minutes i will officially turn 28 years old. it's time to start feeling old. just a mere 2 years separates me from age 30 (one of those milestone age, like coming to a toll on the road of life). it's not the getting old part that bothers me, it's the fact that i don't quite yet feel i've achieved what i think a 28 year old should have achieved. it's nice to have a birthday so early in the year though, because i feel like i have the rest of the year to maybe affect some changes in my life, to resolve any regrets. at 28 years old i should be feeling mature but i don't feel mature at all. when i was a little boy i was the kind of child who was always very quiet and who seemed to be mature beyond my age. yet now when i am at a mature age, i feel like i've regressed somehow back to being a little boy, still inexperienced thus far at this stage of life. i might be able to talk smart, but sometimes i feel it's all an act. i have major insecurities about how a person my age should act. for some people, a birthday is a time to celebrate. but for me, it feels like just another day with 364 more like it to go, with varying degrees of interest and dullness, happiness and sadness, successes and defeats.

yup, nothing like another ring on the old tree of life to make me get all philosophical.

i don't even want presents. not that i'm not materialistic (though you can't easily tell, since i have a cheap fashionless dress style), just that if i want something, i'm much better at getting it myself because rarely do i get what i want. on a birthday, i just want to be recognized, and not in any sort of lavish ways, but maybe just a "hey, i heard it's your birthday today," and i would reply with an awkward "uh-huh, yeah," and then i'd get a "well, okay, anyway, i'll let you get back to work," in return. that's all i want. to be recognized, to be remembered, to somehow know that my presence is appreciated in a positive way, that's all the present i could ever want or need. you let me worry about presents. besides, i have expensive tastes and being that this is the 21st century and most of us are cynics, i would never accept an expensive present because i'd think the giver might want something in return.

so in the time it took me to write up to this point, the clock has already gone past midnight, so official it is february 12th, and so officially it's that time of the year again.

what does 28 feel like? feels like sitting in front of my computer listening to it hum, drinking perrier water and thinking about tomorrow, thinking about work, and then not thinking about it, and thinking about going to bed early. for a second there i had an image of myself suddenly growing very hairy like a werewolf as soon as i turned 28 years old, like there would be this magnificent physical transformation, like my cranium would enlarge, or maybe suddenly i can see through walls or read people's minds. why can't aging be a dramatic metamorphosis where each year we develop some new power? okay, maybe that esp stuff or x-ray vision is farfetched, but how about when you turn 16 years old suddenly you develop the instinct to operate a moving vehicle, or maybe at 18 you suddenly discover the amazing ability to vote, or at 21 this incredible power of consuming large quantity of alcoholic beverages suddenly pops out of nowhere (my little ode to the drinking world ;-)).

anyway, other than the fact that i have now slammed headfirst into a new age, nothing else noteworthy happened today. i went to work, and then i worked, and afterwards i did some more work, and finally i worked a little more, and then i came home. really cold today though, one of those days that actually got colder as the day wore now. usually it warms up a bit during the afternoon only to then steadily drop down in temperature. not today though, it got progressively worse, and of course at the end of the day i had a meeting downstairs and i had to come around the building in order to attend this pow wow, literally shivering the entire walk over there. do i even have to say it? yeah, it blows. but at least at 5pm it's not dark anyway, every day we gain another minute of sweet daylight. spring forward, spring forward!

i got rufus wainwright's "cigarettes and chocolate milk" stuck in my head. i'm not even sure that i like the song, but it sort of just grew on me like a musical epiphyte. sure beats the other song i had stuck in there an hour ago, "send me an angel" by the real thing. my mind is like a song sponge, you can just whistle a few bars from a song and it will get stuck in my head for the rest of the day.

oh, something interesting did happen on my way back home. waiting for the bus, this man with severe tourette's syndrome stood next to me. i've seen him before, he once yelled at me for writing in my journal because it was too dark. yeah, so you can say we're good friends. from the corners of my eyes i could see a perimeter opening up around us as people involuntarily leaned away from this strange man who would occasionally be screaming out whatever came to his mind. but i didn't flinch. i took it as a personal challenge, sort of like facing up to what you fear the most, and i'm not even that scared of crazy people (he didn't seem violent, and if started gesticulating violently in my face and i get hurt, it'd just make my story that much funnier). i stood fast, not budging an inch from where i stood, he and i practically touching each other while everyone else backed off. i pretended to be spacing out, totally ignoring him despite his tourette's theatricals. we got on the bus and i saw him sitting at the front of the bus. midway through the trip the bus driver scolded him, "you behave yourself! i've had enough of you! just be quiet!" and that seemed to do the trick, because he didn't have anymore outbursts after that (it probably wasn't tourette's, but nevertheless it can be safely said that he wasn't completely all right in the head). at star market two mentally handicapped people came on the bus with grocery bags in hand. so suddenly the front of the because a mentally challenged convention. it wasn't anything particularly funny, but i just thought it was kind of interesting, like, what are the odds of that happening? and especially after seeing that movie saturday night on trainables, i seriously have new found sympathy and respect for mentally handicapped people and how they strive to be productive members of society. but i really admire some mentally challenged people's who have no inhibitions, who do whatever that want at the risk of being ostracized from society or even arrested. their uninhibitedness is a welcomed defiance against the tight "proper behavior" chokehold modern society has inflicted upon us. these crazies are true rebels!