bignoseduglyguy

Hmmm...

When all is said and done, it has been proven to be an even bigger anticlimax than the quiet and uneventful minutes that followed midnight on January the 1st 2000. The vast majority of the world's computers carried on computing without so much as a blink of an LED to evidence the much-heralded Y2K meltdown. So it is that, in much the same way, I have slipped into my 41st year on the planet without the onset of the Male Menopause or the first sign of Male Pattern Baldness or plunging into a Mid-Life Crisis or anything else that demands Heavy Capitalisation. Instead, my passage past this milestone in my life has consisted of going to a friend's party, sleeping, going out out for a pizza lunch, staying in for a DVD with SWMBO and sprogs, staying in for longer when 10 friends turned up, sleeping again, going out again for beer and noodles, sleeping again and then waking up & drinking tea in bed whilst opening cards. All of which I have thoroughly enjoyed in a contented all's well with the world kind of way. In a reply to a birthday email from the Brother With The Organic Farm In France (not to be confused with the Sister Who Lives Near Zurich), I wrote:

If I am truthful, and there's no reason not to be, I'm probably more at ease with who I am than at any other time in my life thus far. Life's far from perfect but, wild dreams aside, I'm pretty happy with my lot at present. SWMBO and I continue to work at being good parents (and good partners with the little time left over) and, looking around us, we seem to be faring better than a lot of folks in riding out the inevitable storms.

That I find myself happily writing this amuses me a lot. Because I am a senior manager in a multinational when I trained to be the actor I'd always wanted to be from the age of six. Because I'm married with four kids when, in the never-ending aftermath of the trainwreck of my parents' divorce, I swore to avoid those very things at all cost. Because the stand-out-from-the-crowd white mohican'd, pierced and studded punk of then has become the blend-into-the-crowd cropheaded Joe Public of now. But mostly because I like being me, which wasn't always the case.