I am fifty-five today.
I feel a strong need to write something here to keep up with tradition, but I’m actually writing this weeks before my actual birthday, because my time management is so horrible, I will otherwise forget to do this and suddenly remember in mid-July. Also, I’ll be in Mexico on the actual day of my birthday, so I should figure this post out now.
55 is the 11th number in the Fibonacci sequence. The previous number was 34, and the year 2005 seems like three lifetimes ago. The next one is 89 and I honestly don’t expect to make it that far. 89 is also the year I graduated high school, so if there’s some miracle in stem cell therapy that keeps me going, expect an oddly nostalgic post 34 years from now.
55 is a nice round number that’s probably the end of middle age and the beginning of the senior years, which really doesn’t sound or feel right. I think about this far too much, the need to divide my life into three clean acts, and that act 3 is probably starting now, if it hasn’t already. I’ve read too many self-help books about midlife crisis and finding your purpose at the end of your life, and the only consensus that I’ve found is “do what makes you happy” or some similar advice I can’t entirely follow.
The IRS has something called the Rule of 55, which I’m now eligible for, I guess. After you turn 55, you can withdraw from the 401K at your current employer without penalty if you leave your job. I don’t plan on retiring this year, but it’s nice to know I won’t take a 10% hit immediately if I had to use this money to survive. The “when do I retire?” question seems to come up more now, and this nice round number presses the issue a bit more. Other magic numbers on the calendar include 59 1/2 (when I can withdraw from any retirement account without penalty), 62 (Social Security early retirement age), and 65 (Medicare eligibility.) I fully expect both Social Security and Medicare to be gone in the next three years, so remove those from the equation. (Actually, I expect it to be fully functional for everyone born before January 20, 1971, and that’s when the retirement age will be changed to 90 or something.)
55 is into this weird bubble with regard to health and death. When I was 34 or whatever and a classmate died, it was either a rare cancer or a spectacular car crash. I think after your young and stupid years are over, you enter a few decades where you’re probably not going to suddenly die, provided you wore a seat belt and didn’t sniff any questionable white powders. Now I’m firmly in the era of people just dying. I wouldn’t say “old age” but now people my age die, and there’s a lot less “too soon” about it.
So lots of famous people lived to the ripe old age of 55 and then didn’t. And some of them aren’t health things: Will Rogers had a plane crash at 55; Kate Spade killed herself at 55. So did Del Shannon. Johnny Ramone had cancer; so did Robert Urich. Woody Guthrie had Huntington’s. Paul Lynde had a heart attack. I think if I was in college and you asked me about Friedrich Nietzsche’s death, my answer would be, “Yeah, he was old.” Well, now I’m the same age as him.
Writing this entry 20 days after writing my end-of-year summary always sort of sabotages things here. I just about all of the quantifiable things of the last year: how much I wrote, walked, published, ate, flew, whatever. I guess I’m supposed to write about what I feel here, in some philosophical sense? All I feel is that I should keep writing. And I am.
My house is currently all half-dismantled because we’re getting it painted next week (or this week, I guess), and all of my paper journals are buried behind six metric tons of books in crates right now, which is great because I won’t go back and read what I wrote on my birthday 22 years ago or whatever (and also have a severe dust mite reaction that will require an Epi-Pen and a Benadryl sandwich). I have many birthday entries here, and I just started reading them, but I need to stop and actually write. So I’ll stop here and do that.