Stewart and I celebrated our 67th and 47th birthdays yesterday with a trip to Santa Barbara. A nice town, beautiful coastline, made all the better by being forced to slog through unrelenting LA traffic to get there. We celebrated on several occasions over the weekend, all of which invariably involved large amounts of food and alcohol (for me anyway), but the moment made it both appropriate and memorable.
Every year I try to mark the occasion of my birth with serious thought, but nothing ever comes of it, save for the conclusion that my random birth in a first world country, to educated parents who likewise insisted that I myself become educated, was a stroke of unbelievable luck. Not to mention the fact that I am gay, which would have been a stroke of unbelievably bad luck had I been born in a great number of other places. Not that Kentucky is the first State one thinks of when contemplating gay rights, but I'll take it over Nigeria.
My parents gave me the Chicago Manual of Style (with which I am now enthralled) so that I may become a better writer someday and, in the near term, a more insufferable critic of other people's work. If it weren't over 800 pages I would be quite inclined to carry it around for emphasis as I point out the errors of other people's compositions. I also got a Neo-Lucida, an optical transference device for people very much like myself who love to draw and paint but lack the necessary talent to transfer what we see onto paper, unaided. It is actually a very clever device, purportedly used by the ancient masters of yesteryear.
Heidi and Greg gave us a college course from The Great Courses, which we love and look forward to listening to. For those unaware, The Great Courses is essentially a company that sells full semesters' worth of college instruction, without the stress of passing exams or wondering how the hell you're going to get a job after graduation.
All in all, a great birthday, and for those numerologists in our midst: Stewart was born in 1947 and I turned 47. I was born in 1967 and Stewart turned 67.