as the pursuit of happiness would say, I'm an adult now

city park, buenos aires
Originally uploaded by dbuc.

well, i neglected to tell everyone it was my birthday 2 days ago, on the 18th. yep, some years ago, in that awkward period linking the 70's with the 80's, my parents (mostly my mom) gave birth to me in Hanna, alberta. little could they have predicted that they'd still be giving me some money, so many years into the future, to help me get by. thanks, guys!

it's at ages like this that age becomes relative. for all intents and purposes, i should have been an adult 4 years ago. or is that more for the 30 somethings? i dunno...some of my friends have been married long enough to have those meaningful anniversaries...like, five years is the ..... anniversary, 10 is the....i don't really know the appropriate gifts, but i guess they do. i also have to start thinking about my 10 year high school anniversary...it's not the 10th year, but planning should begin this year, if we're going to have one. ah, the anniversary...where people go in shame for what they were. where people go in shame of what they have become. where people don't go.

I'll go. i won't make cheesey amends. i wasn't an asshole in school. i also wasn't particularly nice. i got mad at my friends for picking on the 'heathens' as we called them. i was part of the problem, in labelling them as such, but i didn't pick on them. and i told my friends not to. in hindsight, it wasn't much and i wish i had done more.

here's the story behind the heathens. In our town, around age 14, all of the outcasts, geeks, dweebs, dweeby geeks, etc, were branded with a name...heathen. hanna heathens. at first, i can assume they hated it. then, they accepted it, and actually became a large group. maybe they had nothing in common before, but now they were linked as heathens, and the rest of us had created it. it was awful and cruel. you couldn't be with a heathen...of course, there were crossover heathens who played football etc, but, for the most part, they were quite poor, had low low self esteem, and would have been brutalized by a lot of assholes who, while ultra cool in high school, have amounted to nothing outside of high school.

in the end, the heathens all dropped out of school, for the most part, with was a huge number. my grad class was 46. it should have have been more like 60. awful. and our teachers did nothing about it. small towns can be cruel.

well, anyway, that's that. i'm old. i regret the way i was in high school. i receive money from my parents. this was random, and i thank anyone who read the whole thing and got any sense out of it. i don't think i did.