49

Another year, another one of these posts. Ugh.

My first thought with this crossing of the 1/20 birthday line is a fear/uneasiness about this being the last year of my forties. A year from today, I’m going to be in a serious funk about hitting the big five-oh, vacillating between “it’s just a number” and “we’re well beyond the halfway point now.” I’m not ready to be fifty, and I need to find a way around that.

I keep thinking about this because I just went to the optometrist, and they cannot figure out my eyesight. I now have three different pairs of glasses, four if you count my sunglasses. There’s the close-up reading glasses I only use when I’m reading books in bed. I just added a mid-range set of glasses, which work perfectly when I’m at my computer or a laptop, which is my chief complaint that they never could fix. And then there’s the distance pair, which is now also a progressive lens with close-up when I look down. They also add a weird dead space in my peripheral vision, which makes me not want to wear them driving, and they’ll probably end up in the garbage, except for the fact that the medium makes anything more than three feet away blurry. No, I can’t get lasik. No, contacts won’t fix it. No, those stupid eye vitamins don’t do anything. This is the new normal, I guess.

The flip side to this is I don’t want to dwell on the various things that may or may not be going wrong. I may have the power to fix some of them (i.e. not eating every fucking thing I see) but I also don’t want to worry about the inevitable. A large portion of my family is sick and falling apart, and it’s like after a certain point, people define themselves by their ailments. I want to avoid that. I’m not sure how, though.

Another thing – I’ve noticed I spend every day during the week wishing the week was over, trying to get through it as fast as possible. I do this 52 times in a row and then wonder where the year went. I think I already covered this in the inevitable stupid end-of-the-decade summary but it’s something I want to figure out how to balance. I need to travel more or something. Get out of my routine. Find a new hobby. Something.

I’m trying to focus on what I can get done in the next year. I have two very big writing projects in the queue, one that’s closer than the other. I’d really like to get one of them done in 2020. Ideally, they’d both go. I need to focus on that. I’ve been a bit obsessed with the writing process with both Rumored and Atmospheres, going back over old journals, trying to figure out how the process went, how I decided things were “done.”

Anyway. I think the plan next year has to be a big thing in Vegas. This year, I get the day off for a three-day weekend, and it’s another superfloat and a big lunch, then some walking and writing. And at least the last year of my 40s gets an extra day because of leap year, so I’ve got to make sure it counts, right?