33

Nobody puts Leo in a corner.
--Dirty Dancing, the director's cut

Okay, so instead of posting another angst-ridden existential crisis piece about why I'm here and what it all means, I thought I'd post something simple on gratitude. Because it's my birthday, damn it, and I'm grateful for these 33 years.

The circumstances we're born into are uncontrollable and set our fates to a large degree. This is both unjust and true. I'm on the lucky side of that coin toss. This says nothing about me as a person. If I had been born in another place, to different parents, or without the love and support of family and friends, my life would be less than it is today.

Or if I had been born in a different time.

So to further this little exercise in gratitude, here's how Time Travel Me would have celebrated my birthday all those years ago:

Me born 1,033 years ago: Dead. I died 1032 years ago from a terrible plague that wiped out half my village. Crap. On the plus side, life would have been miserable, anyway.

Me born 533 years ago: Dead, also. I died 515 years ago, in childbirth.

Me born 133 years ago: I’m alive (woo-hoo!). On the downside, I didn’t finish a high school education, much less college, and toil all day in the house (if you know me, I’m not one for toiling, in general). And since there is no birth control, I’m on my seventh kid. Only one has died, so I count my blessings. I’ve never written a thing. There are some joys, of course, but I find my greatest solace in church. Because there’s got to be something better than this, right?

I spend this birthday taking care of the six kids, and feigning a headache with my husband at night, so that there won't be a seventh.

Me born 64 years ago, in Hiroshima: Very, very unlucky. And on a side note, I've always felt slightly disturbed about my birth day for this reason.

Me born 33 years ago in beautiful Burbank, California: Thank you, thank you, thank you. I'm going to eat some delicious Mexican food and, with my kids and family, enjoy my mom's birthday cake later on. Because my mom still bakes me birthday cakes.

I've probably mentioned this somewhere before, but I've always been intrigued by Nietzche's idea of eternal recurrence. Basically, it's the notion that you'd be willing to live your life, with all its pain and sorrows, over and over again in exactly the same manner. No, not just willing. You'd embrace it!

What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more' ... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.'

--Friedrich Nietzche, The Gay Science

I feel like embracing that kind of divinity today. And all of you, too.