to be young

i love it when my friends get all gay and gush over something that i've written. you guys are priceless.

i love it even more when other friends call out the friends who get carried away with comments by questioning their sexuality.

so this weekend's a pretty big deal. surprise birthday party for me. i can't wait to be surprised. i hope that, even though i know everything that is happening, i still get to walk into a place and have everyone yell "surprise!" i've always wanted that.

heidi almost gave it to me. you should have seen the look on her face when i found out what she was up to. you would have thought that i murdered her family and urinated on all the clothes in her closet. i felt awful. she's a sweet girl and doesn't deserve to ever be disappointed. EVER.

i spent some time on swings at a park today with one of my clients. as i swung back and forth i quickly became sick. motion sickness or something like that. i became nauseous from swinging on a swing! when i was a kid i would swing so high that the chains would lose tension as i reached the pinnacle and jolt my spine as tension returned. and today, while nonchalantly swaying back and forth i had to stop because i thought i might vomit. this is terrible. summer is coming, and my carnival-attending is going to be severely compromised due to this new weakness of my stomach - no zipper or gravitron for me. i used to get on those tire swings on the park and have my idiot friends spin me around until i couldn't feel my face, and upon dismounting i would attempt to run around and fall all over the place... those were good times. i don't want this to become another "i'm getting old and you should feel sorry for me" post, but i have to say that i am getting old and you should feel sorry for me. the following is a list of things that indicate that i am not the young man that i used to be.

+ when i was a kid i used to crawl in the mud and get all dirty and slimy. if i saw a snake, i grabbed it with my bare hands and held it up within a half inch of my face to see if i could feel it's forked tongue brush against my nose. fast forward to modern day and observe the following scene: i'm visiting another one of my clients who happens to have several large snakes in an aquarium. in his excitement to introduce his snakes to me, he grabs a three-foot specimen and hands it to me... like i'm going to grab that thing. i believe i took about 14 steps back and screamed "put that thing away!"

what did i think is going to happen? in that moment, i believe that i envisioned the snake slithering up my shirt and biting my nipple with it's poisonous fangs (it was not a poisonous snake) and never letting go. can you imagine a snake crawling up your shirt? it's a horrible thought. apply the same principal to all small animals that look at you with beady eyes: spiders, lizards, frogs, fish, squirrels and mice, etc...

+ i can't drink any more. i drink still - don't get me wrong. but if i have any more than two beers i spend the entire next day trying to exercise demons from my head. what is up with that? i've never been a big drinker, per se, and i've never drank to get intoxicated, but i can't handle my stuff any longer. last weekend we spent some time with friends on friday night, and all saturday my thighs (quadriceps) were burning and stinging. it was terrible i thought about taking myself to the emergency room after webmd.com informed me that i might, possibly, unlikely but probably, have blod clots in both of my legs. one of these blood clots could have broken loose and went straight to my heart, giving me a heart attack and probably killing me on the spot. i couldn't say if the leg pain was drinking-related, but i'm pretty sure it had something to do with being slightly dehydrated and unrested due to a night of sleep less than seven hours.

+ aches and pains are commonplace in everyday life. i have this strange pulled muscle pain in the back of my knee. it flares up throughout the day, especially after my morning run. my grandpa used to complain about pain.

+ when watching march madness last month, i constantly had to ask heidi, "what's the score in the upper left-hand corner?" and heidi would have to look up from whatever important thing she was doing to inform me that unc was beating gonzaga by 22 points. this happened about 26 times during the course of the tournament, and happens very often to this day. i miss being able to see things clearly,.. those were the days.

+ i can't remember anything. i've never been able to remember anything, so i guess this isn't as much as a sign of getting old, as it is memory dysfunction. i wonder if there is a medical diagnosis for how poor my memory is. perhaps i suffer from some rare memory-loss disease wherein i can't remember things that any normal person could recall with ease...

after typing that last paragraph, i realized that there is a little thing called amnesia. no joke. i have nothing else to say (and even if i did, i probably forgot because i was just distracted by a commercial for burger king featuring spongebob squarepants and a sir-mix-a-lot song. is that even real? is that appropriate?)

+ the office is on now. i can't concentrate on this anymore.

i think i've said enough.