Birthday Week Revels: The Day

Today is my birthday or at least it was when I made the notes for this post in my journal. That (along with my tenuous hold on reality) makes me feel fully vindicated in backdating this post and pretending it is still the second day of my glorious, but now completed vacation:

• Another birthday. This year I decided that I really didn't want to do anything big to celebrate. It's enough to just have the week off, take some mini road trips, and relax. Despite my inclination to kick off the new year by sleeping in, I still found myself up by 8:30 a.m. It is okay, because even without official celebrations, there is much to do on a day such as this. First there I must develop a manifesto for the new year, then I must start filling out my AARP paperwork. If the age of which we shall not speak came this fast (I swear I was 26 yesterday..how can I be this age???), then I know I will wake up 65 tomorrow. I would have thought I'd have conquered the world, made my fortune, or at least amassed some minions by now. Frankly, I'm a little behind schedule and highly disappointed by the noticable lack of people doing my bidding.
  
  Nonetheless, even this minion free day still left me thankful for so many things:
• Health (It's so nice not to feel so worried anymore! It's amazing how much stress such concerns can create)
• An incredible family (aka mom) who buys me new bedding (how I love the feel of new sheets - I can't wait to go to bed), gives me birthday shopping money, and takes me for great lunches at Claim Jumper. Even more important than the gifts (that's right, I said it, MORE important than gifts), we have such a good time together and spend so much of it laughing. It's hard not to love someone who can quietly sit through a whole Introduction to Dianetics video interview with L. Ron Hubbard, looking like she's seriously listening, then turn to you at the end and say in her cute German accent "Man, that guy is boring. I think people must join just to get him shut up."
• Friends who help me move large furniture and remove pesky, stuck sliding doors from my ginormously wide closet, thereby unearthing (or maybe just unuglypanneling) Al Capone's lost photo stalker gallery (thanks, Jen!) of Wigfest photos.
• Other friends who come over after the hard labor is done, but still shower me with gifts and decorating ideas (go Bec - a gift-bearing visitor is a welcome visitor!)
• Happiness. Things have changed a lot in the past year. There was a really rough patch this summer and fall, but it seems to be lifting. Six months ago, if you'd asked me if I was happy, I would have had to say no. At this point things are not perfect - there is much that still confuses me and maybe it's just that cuts have scabbed over and not really that they've totally healed, but at least I don't feel like a walking, exposed, raw nerve anymore. And I do feel happy more often than I don't. That is worth a lot.

So, in the spirit of change and new years, I pulled out my tarot cards for the first time in ages. Appropriately, the card in the Self position of the spread was Death. The Death card is always used as an ominous foreshadowing in the movies where someone gets murdered. Really, it's just a card about change, the end of a cycle and not an end in itself. Beginnings grow from endings, and I really do feel like I am in transition right now. I find myself questioning, wondering, reaching, trying to figure it all out - even things I thought I'd accepted.

The reading was also filled with aces and fiery wand creativity as well as warnings about self-undermining tendancies and fear. Overall, though, the mood of the reading was one of change, and that's good when you feel like you've been treading water, waiting. Maybe what I've been waiting for will come. Maybe it will never return. Sometimes life doesn't give us the neatly wrapped up answers and the happy resolutions we want, even when we want them badly. Sometimes it provides something new. Sometimes what we think we need and what the universe thinks are tragically (or is it comically?) at odds. Maybe I'll embark on a new adventure, leaving the old behind like a hazy dream. Whatever happens, I could embrace some changes about now. And that is, I think, as good start for a new year as any.