Current location:	AmChar Wholesale, Inc
Current mood:	pleased

Birthday
I'm twenty seven years old today.

Obviously, this can't be considered any kind of landmark age. I don't anticipate anything particularly new and exciting to happen just because I have made it another year, and at the same time, this birthday means a lot more to me than most of them in recent memory. I'm getting closer to thirty - which I suppose IS a landmark year, and I think I'm the only person I know who is really looking forward to it. Looking back on my twenties, which most definitely were better than my teens, I'm still a bit dissapointed with how the decade has gone and what I got accomplished.

However, I can still finish out the decade strong, and that's exactly what I intend to do. I want to really leave the last vestiges of childhood behind and take my place as a fully grown man. So far I've done a really good job at that goal - my family moving away over a year ago has taken away that security blanket and support. I've been living totally on my own in a studio apartment instead of sharing a place with a friend. I've stuck with this job for a year now and I still love it and it's still going strong. I suppose the biggest hiccup of the past year was losing my drivers license but that was really just the result of inexperience with the court system and a mistake that will not be repeated.

So, I have some new goals for the next year of life here on Earth.

First and foremost, I want to be happy. I find myself wondering, was I always such a grumpy and overly serious guy? When I think back to my past I seem to remember being relatively cheery and outgoing... at some point and I don't know when it was, I lost my sense of humor and my excitement about life. Now when people talk about me they tend to focus on how dead pan serious I am about everything and how I don't smile very much. I feel monotone and flat, and I am desperate to get some of that color and sparkle back into my every day life.

Secondly, I want to continue stepping up my responsibilities. For example, this past week I finally stopped putting off starting payments on my student loans. I'd like to put a lot of money towards paying off old debts that I'm carrying so that maybe by the time I'm around 30 I will have a clean credit record and be able to do things like think about a new car or even a house. I want to stay at this job and keep doing more and more towards it so that my career continues to advance at a good pace.

Finally, I would really really really like to finally have my premier art show this year. I've been talking about doing it for oh... four or five years now, and I still haven't pulled it off.

Well anyway I am going to finish eating my birthday doughnuts and then I have to start working. Wish my boss had let me sleep in, it would have been a great present! But, he is taking me and some of my guy friends from work to shoot machine guns on saturday, and that's gonna be a fun party :)