New Years and Birthday Plans

A new year, a new pile of Facebook status updates with lists of resolutions and a corresponding pile of Facebook status updates ranting about the stupid futility of resolutions.

Eh, why the hate.  The end of the year feels like a time to reflect on the past, and the beginning of a new year feels like a time to look forward.  It's just human to think about what you want to do differently in the future.

In not quite three months I'll be 48 years old.

You know how everyone says that time passes so quickly now?  When we were children time passed so slowly, school years lasted forever and it seemed like waiting for things like Christmas or summer vacation was unbearable.  I heard that the reason for that is that as you get older each time period - a year between birthdays, for example - becomes an increasingly small percentage of your life.  At ten, the year between birthdays is one-tenth of your total life experience, but at nearly fifty it's a much smaller fraction.

My husband will be turning 40 in April of 2014.  The birthdays that end in zeros always feel like milestones, don't they?  We are going to do the thing he wants to do most in the world, which just happens to fall on his actual birthday: we will go to the Cinema Wasteland movie convention in Cleveland. Greg has already made a Facebook event to invite his friends from Canada and across the US, the people with whom he shares a virtual friendship based on a shared love of exploitation movies, even though he rarely gets to see them.  I'll have fun too, but this is all about Greg.

In March of 2016 I'll be turning 50.  Gads. That birthday feels like doom. Turning fifty means impending senior citizen discounts and menopause and... I don't know, bad things.  It means more than half my life is over, it means all my best years are behind me, it means Old Womanhood.

Yeah, I know, there are plenty of things to focus on other than menopause and senior discounts, and I can name a bunch of people (celebrities and not) who are over 50 and are clearly still young and awesome, but still.  FIFTY.  Yikes.

I have been saying for the past few years that turning fifty in Paris would be the thing to do, but now I am questioning that.  Greg really, really hates being away from home, and the four nights we spent in New Orleans might be as long as he can stand it.  I really don't enjoy torturing my sweetie pie, so even though that birthday will be all about me I'm not sure it's worth it.  So now I'm considering whether 3 or 4 nights in Paris would be worth spending the massive amount of money on round-trip plane tickets (plus the 14 round-trip hours on a plane).

I went to Paris in 1998 on a business trip.  A very short trip, I was only there for a couple of days and I didn't get to go to ANY museums.  I stayed in a hotel on the right bank near the Champs Elysees, I toured a half dozen other hotels and ate in their restaurants (I absolutely loved that part of my job), I saw Sacre Coeur and bought perfume in Printemps and had a Tequila Sunrise at the Zen Bar.  I went to the top of the Eiffel Tower and on a short cruise on the Seine.  It really felt magical to me.  I've had the good fortune to be able to travel a bit, I've been to a few of the major cities in America and to a couple of different countries, and though I've enjoyed them all I didn't feel the connection that I felt with Paris.  The city seemed like the physical, living embodiment of art itself.  It was so lovely, and I still tear up sometimes when I see photos of the rooftops.

It's such a cliché, I know.  Maybe I was imagining it, I was a lot younger and a fair amount stupider back then.

The thing is, I love to travel. I'd love to spend my birthday in New Orleans, or in New York, or Las Vegas, or in a cabin on a snowy mountainside, or on a beach in Aruba, or on a cruise.  All of those would be much cheaper and much easier.

I don't know.  I still have time to think about it.  I guess right now I'll focus on Greg turning 40 in the midst of cult movie stars and exploitation movie fans and horror movie directors.

I Heart Art: An Etsy Experience

I love Etsy and can spend hours pooting around on the site, looking at handmade soaps and jewelry and wall hangings and clothes, and daydreaming about spending thousands of dollars.  Unfortunately, I don't happen to have thousands of dollars to spare, so I've never actually bought anything.

Until I saw this store!  This artist hand paints lovely little portraits onto actual pages from vintage books.  Having a bit of a book fetish, I thought this was the coolest thing ever.  And her prices, for originals or prints, are very reasonable.

So when I saw the sweet couple dancing in front of the Eiffel tower, I had to do it.  I bought a print (which is actually enlarged and is bigger than the original book page painting), and a set of note cards.

The artist is in England, and I was a little afraid of the possibility of the prints/cards getting bent in transit, but she packaged everything so well that the artwork reached my eager hands in perfect shape. And she even sent me a bonus note card as a gift, which was so nice of her.

Here's the Eiffel tower print, in a plain black 11x14 frame (I hung it by my bedside table):

The notecards were such good quality, I decided to frame one of those, too, and I put it on my dresser:

I'm sure this is obvious, but I do want to make it clear that she didn't compensate me or anything for this blog entry, I just wanted to share her stuff because I was so impressed with it.

And I'm so not kidding when I say I am really, really, really tempted to buy this, a giant octopus wall decal.  Neat!

Screw You, Someday

"Bucket list" is a term I've been hearing a lot for the past few years. I like the idea of identifying the things that are important to do before kicking the ol' metaphorical bucket, but for some reason that I can't really put my finger on, I'm annoyed by the recent trendiness of it.

Maybe because a good number of these bucket bloggers seem to be in their 20's and have lists titled 30 Things To Before I'm 30 that include visits to half the world, SCUBA diving, betting a giant pile of cash on one hand in a Vegas casino, attending Oktoberfest, climbing Mount Everest, etc.  A quick googling overview shows a big pile of bucket list blogs by young (FYI, "young" = anyone who is not as old as I am) people talking about Setting Priorities and Documenting Experiences and Having Goals, and a much smaller number of very sad blucket list blogs written by people who are actually dying and are trying to make the most of their remaining time.

Maybe because for the last several years I have been confronting my middle-age status and dealing with the knowledge of my own inescapable death. I don't think I've had anything that could be considered a mid-life crisis, not really, but I have had moments of very bitter awareness that my time is running out, I've already passed the half-way mark.  For basically my whole life I filed away things in an I'll Do It Someday file in the back of my head: going to Barbados, learning to speak Spanish, riding a gondola in Venice, floating in a hot-air balloon, etc.  When it hit me a few years ago that my time to do things is limited I realized I can't possibly do all the things in my Someday file.  The day I stopped putting things in my Someday file was a sad day.

I wrote about the whole thing here:  http://existenceofellen.blogspot.com/2009/10/mid-of-my-life.html

After thinking about it for a few years, I'm starting to have a different perspective.  Indiscriminately sticking things in an imaginary Someday file really wasn't worth very much.  I didn't stop to think about how reasonable the things would be, how much they would cost me in time and money, and whether I would be likely to get anything much out of them.  It was the mental equivalent of hoarding.

I was forced to throw out the whole moldy pile of half-assed Someday plans, and decide which few were worth saving.  Which VERY few.

The first and most important thing, the one has been yelling at me and waving desperately from the depths of my stupid head for decades, was writing.  So I made that my top priority, and I did it.  I wrote a whole novel!  Now I'm writing another one!  *whew*

The next thing is to go to Paris.  I want to go to Paris so badly.  Greg and I had planned to go once before, near the end of 2007 we decided to start planning a trip, and I was compiling information and buying guidebooks and doing internet investigation when The Year Of Hell hit us.  After Greg lost his job I gave up on planning the trip at least temporarily, and when he was forced to take a job making a lot less money I gave up for good.

But now things are getting better, our financial horrors are easing somewhat, so the idea of Paris has been creeping back into my head.  My last defenses were knocked down the day I gave in and looked at Paris vacation apartment rentals online.  Some of them have little balconies!  Oh, man.

We have decided to loosely plan to celebrate my 50th birthday in Paris.  That'll be March 17, 2016.  Next year we will have a chunk of our debt paid off and will be able to begin saving, and even if we can only save a little every month, we still have plenty of time to save up enough for at least a modest vacation.

PARIS!