Rant #3,121: Just Do It!

I am back …

And somehow, I have gained a full year in age since the last Rant that I wrote.

I guess that is because today is my birthday.

Happy birthday to me! Happy birthday to me!

I am the ripe old age of 66 today, a true old fogey if there ever was one.

As I write this Rant, I might just be exactly 66, as I was born around this time of morning 66 years ago.

Whatever the case, today is my birthday … and to show how old I really am, I share my birthday with the New York Yankees’ supposed phenom, Anthony Volpe.

The “problem” is that he is 22 years of age today, so I am exactly three times his age.

But on the other hand, I also share my birthday with actress Ann-Margret, who is about one and a quarter times as old as I am, at age 82.

So that is the long and short of it.

Today should be the easiest Rant of the year for me to write, and the first part of this entry was, in fact, pretty easy to write, but honestly, I am all pooped from writing lately.

On Wednesday, I had a busy seven-hour day writing about a convention for work, and for the second day of that convention on Thursday, I had an even nicer 13-hour day doing the same thing, so I have reason to be tired of writing today … but if the work comes in to me, I have to do it;

I mean, that is what work is, and I see I have a short editing job that still has to be done, so I have to do it, and I will, a bit later.

I wrote so much yesterday, in particular, that not only does my mind hurt, but my rear end does too, from sitting in my chair so long.

But hey, that is what I make the big bucks from, so I gotta do what I gotta do.

And the good thing is that since this is the last weekday of the month, today is the day I send in my work invoice, and I can get paid by the beginning of next month at about the same time as I get my Social Security payment, so I will be “in the money” for about five minutes, until I need to use the money to pay bills and some other costs that I bear.

Last year was the big 6-5 birthday, so my wife and son held a big bash for me where we had a lot of people over to the house.

This year is the lesser 6-6 birthday, so we are doing something lesser to fit the occasion.

Today, we will have the requisite cake and I will get some presents … my wife already bought me new sneakers and some other clothing, and she gave these gifts to me earlier this week, mainly because she did not want me walking around in seven-year-old sneakers anymore.

(Me, I didn’t mind it at all. The sneakers may have looked like they were not just seven, but probably 70 years old, and who can argue with sneakers that spanned the continents, as they were the sneakers that I wore, new, when I went to South Korea back in 2016?)

Anyway, for tomorrow, I invited over my daughter, who I don’t see too much of, and her boyfriend, who I met only once, at last year’s big 6-5 celebration.

We will celebrate with birthday pizzas—can you get at least one candle in a pizza?--and I think it will be a nice time for all to reconnect again.

I guess that at this point in the game, birthdays should be a bit ho-hum to me, but somehow, they aren’t.

I am like a kid with my birthday, and I simply cannot wait for the gifts and the cake that I will get later today.

I never minded my birthdays as some others do, and I think gaining a year is like making another notch in the holster, a day where I can look back at the previous years and look ahead to, hopefully, many more years of a good life.

I still cannot believe that I have reached this age; it just seems like yesterday that I was playing in the dirt, digging for gold with my friends near the building that I lived in.

But boy, have things changed for me since those days!

I don’t dig in the dirt anymore; but I do dig, maybe “dig in” is the better way of saying it, for the twists and curves that every day seems to bring me.

Yesterday was no exception, as in between all the writing that I was doing, I was trying to get my mother a renewal on a prescription she had, and boy, I was having problems doing it.

Without getting into specifics, I think that that wore me down more than the writing did.

But at age 66, I can still do it; I don’t need a power pill to do anything … I just do it!

And if I leave you with any advice on my birthday, it is to “just do it,” (sorry, Nike, I have absconded with your tagline) and do the best that you can while doing it.

I have found that somehow, someway, it all comes into place if you give it the maximum effort—

Not all the time, of course, but al least you know, in your heart, that you did what you could do to make things right.

So, “just do it” this weekend, and I will speak to you again on Monday.