Another year, another birthday I didn’t expect to see.
The number 42 is important for nerds like me. Douglas Adams immortalized it in his The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, and geekdom picked it up from there. It’s the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything. What’s the question? Nobody knows. What I do know is that I’m exhausted, and I have no answers.
I also don’t have much to say for the last year. I worked. I even got paid for it sometimes. But those times seem to be over, so it’s back to the torture of trying to get a tech job, now with the added weight of being too old to hire. Impossible odds, as I see it, and yet more likely than the other big event that may or may not be looming in the future.
About two months ago, I proposed. And she said yes. That joy, like all other joys in my existence, was short-lived. The wedding is still planned for next October, six days before I would be writing another post like this, but my lack of income (or prospects or hope or anything like that) is leaving that very precarious indeed. We don’t know if we’ll be able to pull it off. Even if we do, we don’t know what the future will hold. And that’s just not the way to enter a marriage.
So that’s where I stand at the start of my 42nd year: uncertain and, to put it mildly, frightened. I only have two realistic options, as far as I can see. I’m not good enough (or brown enough, which is more important in today’s world) to pull a job out of thin air, and I’m not brave enough to break this off before the point of no return.
Happy birthday to me. Yay.