I am 31

Remind me to never work on a birthday again.

I feel awkward being here.  On my birthday.  I feel like people have to do things for me, say happy birthday, buy and sign a card, bring in cupcakes.  And I don't like it.

I don't know why I don't like it.  I feel like it just doesn't matter.  This is just another day.  There is work to be done, students to teach, life to enjoy.  I take every day the same way.  I try to enjoy it the best I can.  Just because it is my birthday, I don't enjoy it any more than just another day.

Accomplishment is the greatest source of pride that I know.  Let me write something, let me teach something worthy, let me get recognized for a good deed or a good lesson--but please, a recognition of a day of birth doesn't feel that right to me.  It makes me feel all silly.

And I am supposed to say thank you and talk about what my plans are.  But, if it is someone else's birthday, I fall into the same trap.  I am the one asking them everything, telling them that they need to enjoy their birthday.  Haha.  Why is it so weird for me then.  I even tried to psych myself out, and I tried to tell myself to act "political", to act, act, and act.  Maybe this is why the Standings fail at certain things: we are horrible actors.  We seek truth, and when we can detect a false note, we are quick to alert the crowds of it, most times at our folly.  We look like the particular one, the nit-picky ninny.

I have learned that every day is amazing, that life is the greatest gift.  That people make this life wonderful.  I have learned that meaning is the basis of everything, whether fabricated, or felt deep in one's bones.  Meaning is what people wake up in the morning for, go outside, and greet the day.  Depression is linked to a loss of meaning, to a loss of finding the significance in daily life.  This is why depressive people have so many problems: it is a fixation on the lack of meaning, which is causally linked to this unmitigating emotion of one's pointlessness.

But we must remember, in the famous words of Irvin Yalom, a man whose ideas influenced my thinking more than any other's, that "if nothing matters, then it should NOT matter that nothing matters"