Right around three weeks ago now, I turned 30, on Thanksgiving day. Every day since has been a struggle, as I deal with the constraints that old age brings. I’ve had to deal with a myriad of physical ailments throughout my thirties, including a pretty serious sinus infection with accompanying fever, a pulled muscle in my back, which does seem to happen periodically, but has lingered longer now that I’m officially old, and, potentially the most deadly of all…a lingering man cold.

Such is my life, though, now that I’m 30 years old.

Additionally, I live with a real live girl, one that smells nice and looks pretty, but also yells at me for not replacing the toilet paper, and for having to be told to fold my clothes, and this combination of qualities both thrills and scares the living shit out of me at the same time. I live with a constant fear that I’m going to muck the whole thing up in some inane way, like making an accurate, if not particularly subtle, observation about her driving habits, or farting on her leg as I sleep. I’m sure one day she’ll find out that I have no idea what I’m doing when it comes to relationships, so to throw her off guard, I’ve asked her to marry me.

We share our apartment with a cat who likes to lick glue and deodorant for the contact buzz, and who bites at my hand when I try to pet her. She is grumpy and irascible, and she is slow to give affection and quick to take it away, and she smells funny. So we stock up on Band-Aids, and continue to give her attention.

I work in a job that I love to hate, for a company that both delights and angers me in any given day. I have co-workers who make me laugh and drive me crazy in the same breath, both of which I seem to enjoy. I work for clients that I complain about when on-site, but can’t imagine staying away from for any extended period of time. I have threatened to quit my job more times than I can count, but I couldn’t imagine working for anyone else.

I have friends that I love, but never see. I complain about this incessantly, and then I’m never available when invites are sent.

29 was so much less complicated.

And yet, I couldn’t be happier.

Everyone who knows me well knows that I’m a fairly computer oriented person. Many of my hobbies involve computers, and when I’m not participating in those activities I’m spending 8 hours a day minimum at work with my face buried in a computer screen. Because of this predisposition, I wrote, a while back, about life as if it was an all encompassing computer application, which I entitled Life 2.0. This, ironically, is not an addendum to that post, but rather a rebuttal. A few significant events have sparked my renewal of interest in this topic recently; events that I have been hesitant to share, because they very much require a feeling of comfort and sense of ease among other people be present before I felt comfortable to share with the outside world.

The first major event is centered down south, in Oxford. The Sister sat myself, the Mom, and a few friends, the Girl included, down in the Mom’s living room the last time that we travelled down for a football game, to announce a major bit of news. When she announced that she was pregnant with the baby due mid-spring, and that her and the Future-Brother-In-Law were getting married. I’d like to say that everyone was really shocked, but the sister is a really bad secret keeper, and the Girl called it before the announcement was even made. Nethertheless, while everyone wasn’t shocked, they were happy, and that’s what is most important. So while I’m down in Mississippi between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, I’ll be serving as the Sister’s best man, and the Girl will get to go to the first wedding in a long time that she didn’t have to take a part in planning.

The second major event is infinitely more personal. About a month ago, the Girl and I, after some serious reflection on where we were in our relationship, and where we wanted to be in the future, decided to move in together. We’ll be moving in to a two bedroom, two bath apartment at Camden at Fairfax Corner in early February. To say that this decision was difficult for us would be the understatement of my lifetime up to this point. Just our families and a few close friends have heard the news up until now, and reactions have run the gamut from happiness and excitement to concern, but the Girl and I did not come to this decision lightly, and we’re comfortable in it, and are ready to move forward, as happy as ever.

Which brings me to my point. Life, is, obviously, not a computer application. Things change, often for the worse, and luckily, as in my case lately, for the better as well. It’s unpredictable, and never monotonous. But we’ve been so well trained by computers, and by technology, and by the other trappings of American success that we often forget to stop and do simple things that bring our life so much joy. Actually, and more accurately, that define our lives and make them what they are. I woke up on a Wednesday morning not more than a month ago, and turned twenty-nine years old. And while I may be forced to spend the remainder of my professional career in front of a computer, pecking away at progress reports or organizational charts, it won’t define me, and it won’t define my life. Nothing that I experience via technology, will make me as happy watching my sister get married, or watching the Girl’s face light up at the thought of us sharing our lives with one another, and nothing that technology provides me will make me as sad as the real disappointments that I’ve had in my life either, but that’s ok.

Which isn’t to say that technology isn’t valuable, or doesn’t serve it’s purpose. It should be used, though, to enhance our lives, and not to define them. Which is why I want, once again, start writing more frequently. And I will, because I’ve been doing a lot of living lately, and I want to share it with those whose lives my life will enhance, and whose lives my life is enhanced by.

I’ve been contemplating for a couple of days what to write about the Fourth of July. I feel a like there’s a certain expectation of me to write something some empassioned speech about patriotism an the rights that we hold and share as Americans on this important day in our history. And I feel this way simply because I live in our nation’s capital, and we bloggers from D.C. are supposed to be serious and political.

But I’m revolting. I’ve decided that instead, I’m going to speak this July Fourth on an interesting trend that I’ve seen creeping it’s way into our grocery stores and our convenience stores. It’s Lime. And I like it.

Vanilla, Mint, and any of those other ‘added flavors’ are old and busted. Lime is the new hotness. Lime is everywhere these days. It’s in soft drinks, hell, it’s in soft drink commercials. I was in the grocery store this afternoon picking up some things, and everything at the grocery store is now coming in a lime flavored version. The only thing you can’t get with lime flavoring at the grocery store these days is actual limes. They were nowhere to be found.

I for one love it. Can’t get enough of it, actually. I came home from the grocery store, and made come chicken salad, making sure to add my lime-flavored mayonnaise, threw it on some bread, threw a lime-flavored pickle on top of it, tossed it onto a plate, along with some Fritos, that just happened to have a ‘hint of lime’, and ate my dinner, along with a cool, refreshing, lemon-lime Sierra Mist. And I couldn’t have been happier.

Spring has roared in like a lion, and with that comes warmer weather, longer days, and of course baseball. And for the first time in a long time, the nation’s capital is celebrating the yearly beginning of the national pastime. And suprisingly enough, the Washington Nationals have come out of the starting gates as one of the hottest teams in baseball, taking two of three from the Phillies with suprisingly good pitching and timely hitting from players like Brad Wilkerson, who has already hit for the cycle.It’s an exciting time all around, but of course, with this being D.C., there are some problems, or some people complaining.

In this cast though I don’t think that it’s unwarranted. Since the season has started the Nationals have only been on television here in the DC metro area a single time. The Orioles however, have been on local stations three times already. That’s because Peter Angelos, the owner of the Orioles complained so much about this team being moved to the DC area, that Major League Baseball has been trying to do whatever it can to apease him since the decision was made. That includes signing a television deal with Angelos that includes a more Orioles games being played in the DC area than Nationals games. It also includes a rather large sum of money going to Angelos fro the television contract, a much larger sum than is normal in such deals.

Angelos is worried that with a new team in the DC area, the Orioles will lose a portion of their fanbase, as well as a portion of their revenues that is generally made from DC area residents making the short trip up to Baltimore during the spring and summer to see the Orioles play. He has a right to be worried to, because this outcome is inevitable. However, instead of whining and crying like a baby about it, and having Major League Baseball make special concessions to him, he might be served to actually put a competitive, entertaining product on the field. I’ve been up to Baltimore for a game. It’s fun, and the atmosphere is nice. I wouldn’t want to hold season tickets, though, because how much fun could it possibly be to watch a baseball team lose between 80 and 100 games year in and year out?

Washingtonians don’t seem to mind, though. The Nationals are in the paper, they’re on the nightly news, hell, they’re everywhere. This baseball team hasn’t even played a home game yet, and local residents are already talking about the possibility of making the playoffs. Everyone is excited about this team in this town, and they should be. I have friends who’ve bought season tickets, and it’s almost all they talk about. I’ve even been trying to pull their ears a little bit early on so that I may be able to procure some of their tickets later on down the road.

Baseball seems like something that even Washington, D.C. can’t screw up.

Note: The title of this post, “You’ve Been Nationalized!”, was blatantly ripped off from the same friend I spoke of in the post. He hopes to make it into a sign, which he will be carrying to every game he attends this summer. I just felt as if he should get credit where credit is due.

I can’t work on my website at work. One day I was working on it when I was supposed to be tying some number to some other number on some sort of report, and one of my supervisors angrily told me to stop, and that I was no longer allowed to be seen on the site while I was supposed to be doing work. I can’t really understand why though. It doesn’t say anything in the employee handbook about that sort of thing. Over the course of my career, I’ve found out that there are a few other things that I can’t do at work either. Twenty-seven other things, to be exact.

1. I am not allowed to work on ANY websites during working hours.

2. ESPECIALLY, if I am charging someone for it.

3. I am not allowed to use the phrase, “Eh, it’s close enough for government work”

4. I am not allowed to take morning naps.

5. I am not allowed to send e-mails to people, if the recipients of those e-mails are within arms length from me.

6. I am not allowed to refer to the mentally challenged employees in my building as “Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs”

7. I am not allowed to celebrate “National No-Pants Day” on company time.

8. I am allowed to celebrate “National High Five Day”, but only with people that I already know.

9. I am not allowed to take after-lunch naps.

10. I am not allowed to make elaborate sculptures out of office supplies.

11. I am not allowed to bring pornography to work.

12. I am not allowed to bootleg pornography using government equipment.

13. I am not allowed to send e-mails to new hires that include the phrase, “Don’t worry about your grades now, just make sure you graduate”.

14. I am not allowed to laugh when asked the question, “What do you have to say for yourself?”

15. I am not allowed to list my race on government security clearance forms as “other”.

16. I am not allowed to initate the Jihad.

17. I am not allowed to start summary memos for meetings that I have just attended with the words, “Dear Diary”.

18. I am not allowed to print out my NCAA college basketball bracket at work, even if it is for the company’s office pool.

19. I am not allowed to drink at the office Christmas party.

20. I am not allowed to turn in my expense report without it being double checked by multiple managers.

21. I am not allowed to take late afternoon naps.

22. I am not allowed to touch co-workers computers, unless I am fixing something that I have previously messed up.

23. I am not allowed to go through co-workers’ bags, even if I do think that they took my keys.

24. I am not allowed to rearrange the furniture in the office under the guise of trying to improve “Feng Shui”.

25. I am not allowed to stray from my group of coworkers during fire drills.

26. I am not allowed to use Photoshop to create elaborate screensavers, desktop photos, or incriminating photos of my superiors on company time.

27. I am not allowed to ask new staff to pick up packages in office numbers that do not exist.