The Birthday

...Approaches.

Twenty three this year. I'm always surprised when it's time for a new birthday. Hopefully 2010 will be the year when it finally feels like it should be time for a new age. Twenty two was a major year, and lots of important, life-changing things happened. I don't feel like rehashing them all, but it was a lot. That's going to have to be good enough, sweet reader.

I'm so, so glad to be catching up at school. I'm still not too far from the mean of age, here, but I can't believe I ever allowed myself to work instead of going to school full time. I didn't even want to fund the lifestyle I was living! Arg. Moving on is sort of the point.

There's a lot going on around the time of my birthday this year... Josh is in town, this will be the last birthday in the forseeable future when Andrea will be in town, the first session of my library research class meets that day, there are ghost tours (what did I do that was so wrong as to merit this, Jeezy Creezy?), Heather's invited me over. On the one hand it's thrilling to have so much going on and I usually thrive in those environments. But on the other it's just too much. There's no way to get out of the ghost tours, sadly. But Josh has said he'll go with me to them that night. I just need to map everything out and decide what will be done, in what order.

Took care of some $$$ things today, continuing Friday's theme of being good with planning the finances. Rough but liberating. I feel peaceful and I'm sticking to paying for anything that isn't a recurring bill with cash. Have to keep myself out of trouble. The way I've calendar-ed things out is feasible and includes a little bit of leeway. The challenge now is sticking to it, and making sure there's income after unemployment goes away. Since ending unemployment by finding a job hasn't gone so well, I don't know about that. I worked out a reasonable amount for gas and a little bit for fun, made that a monthly amount, and then added the bill values I want to pay. Working that out into a weekly figure resulted in an amount that's not impossible. It'll take some doing to find the job, and beyond that I'm going to proceed humbly.

It was nice to learn that after a certain point, I'll be able to have substantially reduced all and eliminated most of my outstanding balances without killing myself. I wasn't thinking that was possible, and I didn't know what to do. I guess that's the oft-upside to facing your uncertainties. Won't always compute that nicely. But sometimes you'll learn what to do. Then you just have to do it.

So here I go.