On the morrow

Originally uploaded by birdcage.

In two hours (give or take a few minutes) I'm going to be a year older... so I guess it's appropriate that after half a year at my "new" job I finally got around to signing up for my retirement package today. Now that the whole dissertation/finishing the doctorate thing is behind me and I'm reasonably sure that there will be no second act in the academy I'm starting to come to terms with that whole period of my life, and maybe even settling with myself over the issue of having decided to embark on that path in the first place. Which is not to say that I don't think "if only I'd known....," I've just hit a point where I usually think, eh, shrug. I didn't know. So there you go.

The exceptions to this scenario are when two topics are raised: dental work and retirement. Because if you would like to have a decent set of choppers or would like not to work until you're eighty-five, then you should cross graduate school off your list with a big, black, indelible ink marker.

Graduate school was hell on my teeth. Or rather, fifteen years of not having dental insurance, eight of those in graduate school when, if I'd chosen a different path, I might have been working at a real job that had dental insurance, was hell on my teeth. I'm pretty sure that poor dental health is endemic to graduate students.

And retirement. I'm not kidding about the being eighty-five when I retire thing. Unless I hit lotto I'm looking at spending my sunset years as a greeter at Walmart. I keep thinking of those eight years I spent not working at a job with a 401K plan while I was in graduate school.

Not that I'm bitter or anything.

So tomorrow I will "celebrate" a medium birthday. As I explained to my homegirl Dr. T, whom I bumped into on my way home from the gym this evening, it isn't a big birthday-- those are the ones that end in zeros. In fact, Dr. T has one of those coming up not long after mine. A medium birthday is one that ends in a five. Not a milestone, per se. More like a reflective mile marker staked in the ground at a jaunty angle. Not surprisingly, both Dr. T and I have been feeling reflective (and not in the mile marker sort of way), what with our impending medium/big birthdays. I suppose that is the way these things often go.

You know, you start thinking about the choices you've made and whether or not they are the ones you would have made knowing better, and how it has affected the options you now have. What you want out of life, what you'd like to accomplish... all the stuff of panic attacks. Are there things I wonder about? Sure. But there aren't any decisions I made, based on the information I had at the time, that I can say were bad, even when the end result was. Which isn't to say there aren't things that I worry about for the next five or ten or whatever years. But at the moment, on the eve of my birthday, I have more things that bring me joy than not, which is the best you can reasonably hope for. Besides, I know at least one gift that is arriving tomorrow that is going to make it a happy birthday, indeed.