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.

Some serious training

I'll be back with regular articles on Monday. I thought I'd get the blog rolling with a special Friday video.



It's great to be back writing about myself all the time.

The Road to Graduation, Part 4

For the most part, my graduation day was fairly uneventful. I honestly don't remember a thing that I did that day except figure out what to wear, put the graduation cap and gown on and take pictures with my grandmothers and my Aunt Pand and Uncle Rid (which all came out fuzzy, because I was the only person in the family who knew how to focus a camera).

I should add that this would be the first time I had ever graduated from anything. I had been to many ceremonies, but I had never participated in one. My brother Loyd got to graduate from kindergarten. I didn't because I went to Head Start. There was nothing cermonial about that accomplishment. There was also no graduation from Park Junior High School. We just had the academic awards ceremony, took a 90 minute lunch and goofed off in class for the rest of the day.

(Later in life, when I filled out job applications, some of the forms would ask where I went to high school and junior high school. Then, they would ask if I graduated from them. I would always mark "yes" for high school and "no" for junior high. I had always hoped that someone was going to ask me how I graduated from high school without graduating from junior high. I would have told them, "We didn't graduate from junior high. We just went to the high school." But no one ever asked. I was disappointed.)

It was a normal graduation. It was just exactly as I had seen about a dozen other times. I don't remember anything anybody said up on stage. We had no special guest speakers. (I should point out that I was not selected by the faculty to be one of the student speakers. My stupid work schedule kept me from coming up with a better speech for the audition.)

The only thing of note that happened was that almost everybody pre-maturely threw their hats in the air. We still had to do the closing prayer. The student selected to give the prayer had to deal with a lot of yelling and screaming as he was trying to get everyone to pipe down so he could officially close the class of 1982. This was even though we had rehearsed the ceremony two days earlier.

I went to one of the student parties at someone's house that night. There were plenty of teens getting served alcohol, and it wasn't just limited to the graduates. It was really my last chance to connect with my fellow classmates. All I experienced was as much distance from the other students as I had for the last three years. Of course, part of this may be due to the fact that I didn't drink any alcohol.

I had to leave the party early because I had to go to work at 6am the next day at the racquet club. I also got roped into joining other members of the choir to talk and perform for the students at my Dad's school. The focus was on members of the choir who had attended Hermosa. Dad didn't tell me about it until that morning, and I really didn't want to do it. He told me I had to, so I got there and was shocked to see that the other students had prepared musical numbers to perform. I really felt out of place for the second time in 12 hours.

It's funny how I don't recall anything that happened that day before I graduated high school, but remember the nonsense I had to do the day after.

So that closes the chapter on a really sucky senior year. However, I found I would have another one of those four years later. It was bad, but not as bad as high school.

And a note about this blog: I will be taking a little bit of a vacation for the next couple of weeks. This seems like as good a place to pause as any as I recharge my writing batteries. After I get myself into college, this blog's format is going to make a radical change. I hope you check back in for it.

The Road to Graduation, Part 3

With everything else out of the way, we seniors just had to focus on attending the baccalaureate and the graduation ceremony, which were two days apart from each other.

In the years leading up to me going to high school, commencement was typically held on the last day of school, which was normally a Friday. The senior class got the week before graduation off. However, I guess there were problems in figuring out who was supposed to be able to graduate before the baccalaureate. This would cause some students who thought they were graduating to attend the baccalaureate on Sunday, only to find out that they didn't pass their final exams and couldn't go to commencement. But they had already dressed up in the gowns and gone to baccalaureate. They thought they were graduating.

So, the administration started scheduling graduation earlier and earlier. My sophomore year, it was on a Thursday. My junior year, it was on Wednesday. My senior year, it was on Tuesday. This meant that we had almost two weeks off from school. I don't think any other class that followed us ever got an earlier graduation day.

I never really understood why we needed to do the baccalaureate. It's a religious type of event in which one of the local preachers delivers an address. Supposedly, the senior class chose who got to speak, but I don't remember anybody asking me who we should choose. The ceremony is confusing because there's supposed to be a separation of church and state. No one ever said we didn't have to go to baccalaureate, but no one skipped it. I don't think there were any atheists in my class. If there were, they kept their mouths shut and came to baccalaureate anyway. At any rate, I still think it was a waste of time.

A few hours prior to the baccalaureate, the entire graduating class had to gather at the football bowl for the group photo and the rehearsal for both the baccalaureate and graduation. We all had to wear our caps and gowns. The Friday before the seniors got out of class, the school paper printed the yearbook photos of the students who were (supposedly) graduating. Not all students had photos available, so it was just their names listed. I saw a few names of students I don't recall seeing at school. One of them really caught my attention because it appeared to be Asian. I don't know how I knew this, but I could tell it was Vietnamese. However, I couldn't tell if this person was male or female, but I certainly don't remember seeing any Asian people in my classes.

I saw this particular student during the rehearsal. It was a girl. As it turned out, she was the last girl in our class to walk across the stage. I think that they put her in the Special Education program because she probably didn't speak English very well. I guess her family had come to Artesia from Vietnam. A majority of the refugees went to Texas and California. I have no idea how they came to my little town, because nobody else from Vietnam wound up there. It's really too bad that I never got to know her, because the woman I wound up marrying turned out to be of Vietnamese ancestry. I wish I could have learned a little about Vietnamese customs beforehand, but I doubt her parents would have wanted her to have anything to do with any American boys.

Up next: The big day that would lead to the rest of my life.

The Road to Graduation, Part 2

Yesterday, I discussed a couple of early steps I had to take to prepare for graduation. There was more to come.

Every year, the seniors get a chance to apply for local scholarships. A number of the civic organizations gave out money left and right to seniors who were going to college. I signed up for the ones that I qualified for. There was literally thousands of dollars' worth of scholarships to be had.

I already had received a $200 academic scholarship to attend Eastern New Mexico University. (Yeah, you may think that wasn't a lot of money, but the total cost of my four-year college education came to $10,000. $200 was 2% of that amount.) I was hoping to build upon that.

I didn't get any of the local scholarships. I was really let down by that. On the bright side, we didn't have any one student monopolize all the scholarships, as had happened in previous years. They were evenly spread around. There were a couple of students who got two of them, but no one got more than $800 total.

One day, the school announced that a couple of other organizations had new scholarships to offer. I went down and applied for them.

One day, a police officer came to my house asking for me. My Mom was with me. He told me he was from the Fraternal Order of Police and that I was chosen to receive the organization's first scholarship ever for $500. I was shocked. I thought I was going to walk away with nothing. He said that the reason I was chosen was because of my being involved in the department's Law Enforcement Explorers program. Wow, four years of working football and bingo games paid off.

It was nice to have a couple of scholarships under my belt. I was proud of myself. However, several months later, I found out that I should have gotten some other scholarships. One of the people who got two scholarships was the girl who led DECA's Free Enterprise project. She received the DECA scholarship and the Rotary scholarship for a total of about $700. Mom told me I was the first runner-up for both of those. This wouldn't have been a big deal, but that girl only went to college for one semester and came back home. That means her scholarships were basically wasted because she probably just went to school and partied the whole time.

The choir also had a scholarship for $200. However, one of the stipulations was that you had to either major or minor in music. I knew I wasn't going to pursue music in college, so I didn't apply for it. However, I found out later that I didn't have a minor listed during my first year of college. This means I could have listed music as a minor for my freshman year, participated in the choir and then change my minor later on. (Yeah, I know. This would have made me almost as bad as the girl mentioned above.) I would have been a shoo-in for the scholarship because the girl who won was not an academic achiever. She was probably the only person to apply. (It was the girl who won "Most Talented" in my class.)

So that was an extra $900 in scholarships that could have been mine under different circumstances. In the end, it really didn't make a difference because my parents had all the money I needed already. They had been saving up for me and Loyd since we were born.

We'll get closer to graduation in Monday's post.

The Road to Graduation, Part 1

The weeks leading up to graduation meant a lot of work for us seniors. It seems like there are so many hoops we have to jump through in order for us to walk across the stage that would be set up for us at the football bowl.

The first step was to order our caps and gowns. At commencement the previous two years, the boys' gowns were orange and the girls' were white. Orange was the main color for our school. I had hoped that those in charge would have realized by now how ridiculous those orange gowns looked and would let the boys wear the traditional black. We got our gowns and they were ORANGE! NOOOoooo! Years later, my Mom had a bunch of my stuff, including my graduation gown. She asked me if I wanted to keep it. I kept the tassle, but threw the cap and gown in the trash. (I had kept my college gown, which was black, but I don't know where it is now.)

(Three years later, Loyd graduated. The boys in his class got the black gowns. I was very jealous.)

Along with the gown, we got our graduation announcements. Mom and Dad had a list of people I had to send the announcements to. Many of them were people I had never met before, like their friends from college that they had managed to stay in contact with.

However, almost everyone I sent an announcement to sent back money. I had received a total of $200. (Back then, that was a lot of money. I explain this in tomorrow's post.) The only problem of course was having to write thank you notes. This was even harder than Christmas and my birthday because I was getting stuff from people I didn't even know.

Another issue was that I needed a graduation partner. At our school, the girls get to ask the boys to be their partners. I didn't realize it at the time, but this is such a big thing that some girls actually line up their partners during their sophomore year. Mom was concerned that if I didn't have a partner, they were going to pair me with another boy, and she didn't like the idea of that because it was going to look weird. (Actually, we had more girls than boys that year. We had girls paired with girls, so there was no way I was going to get paired with another boy in the first place.)

(A side note: The graduating class of 1980 had more girls than boys. In 1981, a couple of girls thought that was going to happen again, so they requested to be partnered with each other. But that year, there were more boys, so they forced them to pair off with boys. I want to point out that these girls were not lesbians, but they were trying to create a stir. This is why Mom thought I was at risk of being put with another boy.)

I had no idea if anyone was going to ask me to be their partner. I remember the year before, one of the guys graduating was pre-arranged to march with one of the hottest girls in the class. She had graduated after the fall semester. That is, she completed all the requirements to graduate and did not have to return in the spring. She sent notice to the school that she was not going to be at the official graduation ceremony, but she did not notify her partner. At the last minute and without warning, he was paired with one of the least desirable girls in the class. (He probably would have preferred being placed with another boy.) I was afraid this was going to happen to me. I really didn't want to appear to be that big of a loser.

One day, I was walking around the halls before school. Three girls I knew were gathered together. One of them saw me and said, "Oh, there he is!" She said, "Fayd, we're lining up our partners for graduation and Mild here wants to know if you'll walk with her." I don't think I spent too much time thinking about this. I had known Mild since the ninth grade. I remember her coming into my Typing class after she had moved to Artesia and she sat in front of me. She was not undesirable, but she was not really a good student, so I didn't pay much attention to her. However, I did have respect for her because she was not a Drud. In that brief moment after being asked, I knew I wasn't going to do much better than this, so I said, "Yes." That was one more thing out of the way.

The only problem with Mild asking me to be her partner was that my Mom got it in her head that we should be dating. I wasn't going to do that.

In the next post, I'll go into detail about the local scholarships. This was perhaps the most bizarre part of the graduation experience.

High School Friend: Stid

This will be my final high school friend essay. That's because I really didn't have that many friends worth posting about in high school.

I originally knew Stid as the son of Park Junior High School's Vice Principal. Stid was a sophomore when I was a senior. I had some encounters with him during the past two years because he was in the Choir in junior high and the Choir teacher would have those students take part in our musical productions. Stid also wound up in the Drama department. I requested he work with Led and me on learning how to operate the lighting and sound system at the auditorium.

One interesting thing about Stid was that he was eligible to take the English II Superior class. However, that year, they only offered one class and it was during fifth period, when Choir was scheduled. There were a lot of people who were in Choir in the ninth grade who qualified, but decided they would rather take the advanced class during sophomore year, so our choir lost a lot of good people who never came back to choir. Stid opted to remain in choir. (Niz also could have been in that English class, but she chose Choir over the five-point A.)

I'm pretty certain that, like me, Stid had Asperger Syndrome. We actually had a lot in common, but he wasn't too much into rock and pop music. He preferred classical and songs that came out of the 1930s and 1940s. We could talk about things we were both interested in for a long time. However, if he started in on something I had no interest in, I could get kind of agitated and try to stop the conversation.

Once he was droning on, and I just sat next to him and went, "Uh huh... yeah... right... uh huh...." Then he said something that got my attention. I asked him what he just said. He said, "Oh, were you just pretending to listen to me? Well, that's really inconsiderate of you!" But we still remained friends after that.

Stid was actually very creative and had written several comedy sketches and plays. Unfortunately, he was not open to any suggestions or criticism of his work. He would kind of tune you out if you said anything contrary to what he had created.

We still hung out from time to time when I came home from college. He was considering attending ENMU. I know he was originally going to major in Music Education so he could become a music teacher. The last time I saw him, he had come to try to get into ENMU's music program on a scholarship. The music professors I knew were very excited at the prospect of him become a student there.

He decided to attend Texas Tech University in Lubbock, TX instead. I guess he liked it here, because he still there. He just got a 20-year service award. He works in the Academic Testing Services department. I have no idea what he does. From what I can tell, he never got married and never had children.

I wonder if he's aware of the possibility he may have Asperger Syndrome. I wonder how he deals with it if he knows. I may never find out.