I'm This Many

There's no question about it. Yesterday was my birthday.

I had the day off of work (it's one of the strange perks that my company does). I opened presents and cards. Lots of people sent me nice messages via social media. Christopher took me out to dinner. There was cake.

If those things don't signify a birthday, I'm not sure what does.

And, really, I don't question that yesterday was my birthday. May 29th, thankfully, is a set date each year.

What I have problems with is the age thing. I'm not talking about having a problem with turning a year older. My problem is with remembering which year older I'm turning.

On the one hand, I spend my workdays surrounded by people who are in their 20s. I mean... I am old enough that I could have fathered about 90% of my co-workers. (Try not to think about that. Lord knows that I try not to.) But much of the time I just chalk it all up to "I'm older than them, but it's okay."

Still, that doesn't bring me to the bigger problem that I have about my age. For about the final 4 months of any given year, I already think of myself as having "turned."

I blame three of my best friends. We're all - for all intents and purposes - the same age. But the other three all turn before me. We start celebrating the change of the year in August. Then October. Then March. And by the time we get to me in May, I've been thinking about the next year for so long that I forget that I haven't actually gotten there, yet.

Christopher made a comment about my age, yesterday, and I honestly had to think about which year I was entering. It wasn't to lie and make myself younger, though. Instead, I - almost instinctively - tried to add an extra year on.

Maybe I need to start going by halves, instead, like we all used to do at about the same time that we were holding up fingers and saying "I'm THIS many!" If I include the halves, maybe I'll remember to keep the lower number in front of it.

Of course, my other option is to just stop counting. Maybe choose an age like 42 and just stick with it. I wonder how long it would take for people the age of my coworkers to figure that out...