Happy birthday to me?

I am twenty today, so here are twenty things about me. Some of them you might know, some of them you might not, but hopefully you learn something and you laugh a little too.

1. I believe success is the best revenge, and so far in my life I’ve been proved right. It lets you put effort that you could have put into hating other people into yourself and into making yourself into the person you’ve always wanted to be.

2. One of the first major purchases I intend to make is a treadmill. This sounds really stupid until you think about the fact that it’s an investment into a healthy lifestyle. Even if I just walk on it for fifteen minutes a day, I will hopefully avoid becoming one of those desk vegetables.

3. I don’t want kids. I’d rather spend every $200,000 (that’s 200 grand) that I would save from NOT having a kid and spend it on Mediterranean cruises. That’s almost half a million dollars if I were to substitute for the two kids I will never have.

4. I’ve written two novels so far. Neither of them will see the light of day (or publishing).

5. There are a few things that will always remind me of college. Some of these things include Starbucks, Domino’s pizza, the Blind Melon song “No Rain,” the Journey song “Don’t Stop Believin’”, and the Neil Diamond song “Sweet Caroline.”

6. I love to bake, but I hate to cook. My favorite things to bake are cupcakes and brownies. One of these days, I will learn how to boil pasta and my culinary skills will be complete.

7. I own an acoustic guitar, but I’ve never really learned how to play it. Currently, my brother needs to replace two of its strings.

8. I have preferred study music. For philosophy, it’s the Dark Knight soundtrack. For writing English papers, it’s Daft Punk’s “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger.”

9. I don’t really understand the current pop-culture fascination with vampires. We get it – it’s a gigantic allegory for the allures of sex. Now get over yourselves (and the strange tingling in your panties when you watched the meadow scene in Twilight).

10. I used to want John Williams’/Hans Zimmer’s/Danny Elfman’s job, but as creative as I am, I’ve never really been able to write my own music.

11. This is my favorite number.

12. While I’m still in college, I would like to, at some point, a) take a ride on a Ninja/other crothrockity type motorcycle, b) shoot a shotgun, c) shoot a bolt-action rifle, d) shoot a revolver, and e) skydive. As far as I know, (e) is happening while I’m abroad, at an indoor facility.

13. I know I’m not unique. None of us are. But it’s different than the “Fight Club” no one is a beautiful snowflake picture. Because I know, even though I share elements with other people, mine are mixed in a totally different way. Sure, I may be the culmination of everything that’s ever happened to me, and sure, most things that happen to other people happen to me, but it’s the way they happened that makes me special. Not unique, but different enough.

14. I haven’t played piano (read: practiced every day for an hour and a half) for so long that I thought I had forgotten how to read music. I now know that is a lie, but it’s still a lot more difficult for me than it used to be, and my fingers get tongue-tied. (I also know that most of you reading this blog have not heard me play. I might like to show off for you sometime in the future, if I can find my Debussy “Deux Arabesques #1” sheet music.)

15. For the first time in my life, I have decent-looking fingernails, skin, and hair. I’m finally growing into physical self-confidence and it feels great.

16. I don’t think I’ve ever had a year straight in my life where my handwriting hasn’t changed. And most people I know haven’t seen my real handwriting. I think it’s a shame that we don’t read each other’s handwriting any longer, in this day and age. I’d much rather garner information about your personality from your scrawl than from your favorite font, although I am somewhat of a font nerd.

17. College, to me, seems to be one of the few socially acceptable means of running away that I’ve ever seen. You choose to run away for four years to this place that you hope will shape you into the human being you’ve always wanted to be, hoping at the same time to meet people who want to undergo the same process of transformation in the same way as you do. I know that for me and at least a few of my friends, college has figuratively meant ‘running away’ from personal problems and hoping that somehow, the presence of a university and other like-minded people will help us overcome the people we don’t want to be.

18. Whenever I see ambulances or fire trucks, I try to cross myself, and I at least say a quick prayer. I just think it’s respectful to do that, even though I’m not particularly religious.

19. Yes, it is entirely possible to watch an entire season of Friends in one day. I’ve done it before.

20. I always love my birthday. This may be since I’m younger than most people in my school year and so do not face the same sort of “holy crap I’m old” feeling that they do every year. I kind of make the date into a huge deal. So far in my life, I’ve never had the kind of serendipitous birthday that I’ve always wanted, a day where I can kind of have the best day ever. I had a two-months late sweet-sixteen surprise party and I met Justin on my seventeenth birthday, but so far none of my birthdays have really blown me out of the water in the kinds of ways I’d want. Plus, I don’t get the right to complain about feeling old, because ‘you’re younger than everyone else’. I think this might make me an incredibly selfish person.

So, there you have it.

- Jen -