Month: October 2021

A true sign of how fast the last year has moved came the other day when I realized that the birthday post I made here for my 46th birthday was, in fact, almost a year old. What does that say about how I interact with the world, I wonder, that I find my birthdays marked by blog posts and finding new ways to talk about getting older? Nothing good, I suspect.

This birthday, the one happening tomorrow, is my 47th. For some reason, I’m getting hung up on that number over the last week, as if it’s the number that puts me closer to 50 than “in my mid-40s,” in some magical fashion that is inescapable and somehow, inexplicably, meaningful: Once you hit 47, there’s no turning back…

The obvious flaw in this argument is, of course, the inherent scariness of being 50. In my head, I know that it’s really a relatively arbitrary number — what is that different about 50 than 40, or 30? Each of those felt like milestones at the time, as if they were ends of one era and the beginning of another. The reality, of course, turned out to be far more complicated, with personal eras starting and stopping at inopportune times and hitting numbers that haven’t been attached with any larger societally agreed-upon meaning. (I was going to prove my point by saying that I got divorced at 44, and then had a moment of, “Is 44 some magic number because of the repetition?”)

Nonetheless, 50 looms in the near future for me, the latest in a line of ages that make me feel as if I should have everything figured out and lined up by that point. I know, too, that that idea is a flawed one; that there’s no such thing as having everything figured out, because life is messy and throws all kinds of distractions and problems in your way just when the road ahead looks smooth. Still, the idea floats ahead of me, a promise so far unmet but maybe possible by some method I haven’t quite worked out yet. Maybe that’s still to come; I have three years, after all.

Now that we’ve finally made it to October, I think it’s safe to finally tell the world: September was cursed.

I mean, that’s the only explanation for quite how strange (and, at times, difficult) the month ended up being, right? I know, I know; October should, by all rights — if not all rites, get it? — be the cursed month, considering it’s Spooky Central and the place where Hallowe’en resides and all, but the evidence doesn’t lie: I’ve never had any October that felt as trying and difficult as this past month has been. September 2021 was, by no stretch of the imagination, a cursed month.

If it wasn’t one dog’s dental surgery — 17 teeth removed at once! They even gave them to me in a tiny little test tube afterwards — then it was new of a tumor in another dog, or the possibility of yet another dog moving in, only for that to go wrong in such a fashion as to be concerning and no little amount of anxiety inducing. (The dog is a lovely dog, but he’s not a dog who could deal with the house as it currently exists, put it that way.)

That’s to say nothing about the wait to find out if the lease on the house would be renewed, or if we’d all be homeless in a couple of months. It was renewed, thankfully; going house hunting in these times would be a trial too far, I suspect. There was also the weekend of wondering if the nine year old had COVID, as well, although it thankfully was just a cold.

Oh, but then there’s the work elements, too; the publication of a piece I finished weeks earlier, prompting all kinds of discourse online that made me feel awkward and uncomfortable, as well as writing new pitches, one of which was for an entire job, many if not most of which came to nothing at all, because things are slowing up in a dramatic sense when it comes to my earning money. At one point, I was getting rejections left, right, and center and wanting to just respond, look at how popular this piece is, I could be doing that for you right now.

October may not be any easier on the work front, but at least everything else is unlikely to repeat in the next 31 days. After all, what are the odds of having two cursed months in a row…?