Today I am 50 years old

Today, 09/01/14, happens to be my 50th birthday. It's a strange time in my life. It's even stranger than when I turned 30 or 40.

Growing up, I thought 50 was really old. I remember several of my relatives around that age, and I was astonished by the diffenence in attitudes between my cousins and their parents. I felt this way until I was 35, when I met a woman who was 48 at the time. She actually looked closer to 30, but even she was concerned about getting up there in age.

A lot of my major milestones occurred in my 40s. I got married for the first time when I was 42, had my first child at 48 and bought my first home at 49. These were things I originally thought I was going to accomplish in my 20s (and came rather close to). The only major accomplishment in my 20s was graduating from college when I was 21.

But just for fun, let's compare those milestones to my father. At 20, he married my mother. At 22, I was born. At that same age, he graduated from college. At 24, my brother Loyd was born. At 32, he purchased 14 apartments and started running them. Right before he turned 33, he purchased our family's first home. At 39, I graduated from high school. At 42, the family moved into our second home and Loyd graduated from high school. At 43, I graduated from college. At 47, he and Mom moved into their third home and then he left her. At 48, the divorce was final and he remarried. He also retired from teaching at that age. By retirement, I mean he stopped teaching. He did not stop working. At the age of 72, he still hasn't stopped.

(I will point out that at age 29, Dad started wearing dentures. He had to have all his upper teeth removed due to severe decay. I had always hoped that Dad would always say, "When I was your age, I owned my own home" or some other achievement. I would then reply, "And when you were my age, you had dentures!" But I never got to do that. I have to admit that my father never measured my success by his previous accomplishments.)

As I go further in this blog, I'll examine why things like marriage and children didn't happen for me quite on that same schedule. However, I should let you know that I'm actually happy those things didn't happen until much later in my life. Those achievements I didn't really need to consider myself a success. I superficially tend to measure success in terms of living comfortably, which I've never really been able to do because of situations out of my control, hence the title of this blog.

I have admitted before that my lot in life is mostly my own fault, that there were opportunities that I never tried to seize when I had the chance. Let's be certain, there are probably more opportunities that I have seized, but they are likely not as large as the risks that I could have taken that might have put me in a better position in my life.

I will continue to examine these prospects as my blog continues. I should go into detail about some of the format changes that will take place very soon here. Once I start writing about college, I'm going to be a little less strict about chronological order as I have been in the past. Since I did so many different things in college, I'll just stick to one aspect at a time until I have completely exhausted that story. Then I'll move on to the next aspect, interspersed with posts about the friends and enemies I made and the girls I tried to hook up with.

I'm hoping that the next 32 years I will be writing about can be wrapped up a year from now, but I don't know what to expect. Apparently, my life is more fascinating that I was originally led to believe.