1. Forty-four laps around the sun. That’s starting to feel like something.
  2. Julia, this morning: “You’re halfway there.” (There is a pause; there is no Bon Jovi “Woooah! Livin’ on a prayer.”) “Unless you live till you’re 90,” she continues. Well, kiddo, we’re probably a little past half. The laps left on the ticker are a smaller number?! That’s scary!
  3. The last 52 weeks have involved a lot of change. For me, for everybody. I love where I am, even though increasingly I feel like a charmed observer, the one who can only shake his head at it all, watching, astonished.
  4. We are in the season of life this fall that mostly involves chasing our kids around to different places. Marching band (x2), soccer (x3), Scouts. Doesn’t sound like that much until you map it out on the calendar. In the middle of August, I find we don’t have a free weekend as a family until after Thanksgiving.
  5. Mom called this morning, just like she does every birthday. I say hello, there’s a beat, and then she sings to me. I’ve never appreciated it more.
  6. Soon I’ll have spent as much time in Cullowhee as I did when I was an undergrad student. Those two periods–four years as a student, four years as an employee–occupy radically different perceptions of time and memory and formation in my mind. It’s funny to think about the adult stage overtaking the college years stage. I still feel like the new guy.
  7. In the last year, I’ve lost about 30 pounds. I assure you I had it to lose. It’s strange to go through a transformation like that, to reorient your relationships with food and satiety. To give your body and brain the space to deliver better feedback. To buy smaller clothes.
  8. This summer I went to Portugal and Spain. Chased that trip with our annual beach week. Followed that with two work trips. 25 days of eating and drinking more than usual. I put seven or eight pounds back on. Then I came home and got back to normal and went back to the gym and soon enough I was back to even. Whatever even is these days. This is…what I weighed in high school?
  9. Well, that’s odd. To think about my physical size in relation to the human being I was 26 years ago. I came to college, gained my freshman fifteen, lived life, had kids, gained fifteen more. Came back. Got serious. Got rid of it. Okay, enough about weight.
  10. This is the year the kiddos officially fell into three schools, even though the elementary and middle school is the same place. I cannot say that turning forty-four makes me feel old. (It’s not old!) Having a kid in high school–early college at that–makes me feel old.
  11. I work with plenty of people in their 20s. I still remember a good bit about being in my 20s. I remember how I looked at people in their 40s. It’s funny to think about them (the 20-somethings) looking at me that way. Even so, I still get to be around people in their 60s. 80s even. I’ll take being in the middle as long as I can get away with it.
  12. There is not enough time.
  13. These are the good days. Bright, sunny days. Our kids are healthy. Our parents are independent. We have so much. So much that I don’t know what to do with it all.
  14. What does prayer sound like these days? Who was it that said there are only three kinds of prayer: help me, thank you, and oh, wow? There’s been plenty of all three.
  15. Anne Lamont said that. Of course, of course.
  16. Oh, wow! I was in Minneapolis earlier this summer on a work trip. We were having dinner at the bar in a place down from our hotel when in walks Mike Mills, the bassist from R.E.M., who sits across from us and reads a book. I had to say hello, even though I knew better. Oh, life.
  17. That particular highlight somehow outshines the fact that I was in Minneapolis to interview a major league pitcher for the Twins, an interview accomplished in the press box of the stadium, where we enjoyed two games with full press credential access. We stood on the field while the Red Sox took batting practice. I mean. What the heck.
  18. Kelly and I still go for walks up Locust Creek, and I still look up at the mountains in wonder of the fact that we live here. I didn’t know if it would wear off. It still hasn’t.
  19. I have been terrible about keeping up with this journal, even though these are probably the times when I need it more.
  20. A funny and terrifying thing. I uploaded twenty years of journals into a custom, walled-off GPT. I asked it questions. It remembered parts of my life better than I did. I spent a not insubstantial amount of time asking it questions. It was weird. At one point, I sent it a list of notes I’d taken in Portugal and Spain, and it cooked up an entire essay that was pretty darn passable for my style. Immediately I wanted to change my style.
  21. Don’t think the numbered list of semi-random thoughts on the occasion of my birthday is in any way original. It’s not. I’ve even done it before.
  22. We watched the Billy Joel documentary, and it was so good. I loved learning about how his musical styles matched times in his life. The out-west songs happened when he was out west. John at the bar was this guy named John. The bigger, heavier stuff came when he found himself playing bigger arenas. It’s different from, say, R.E.M.’s desire to not make the same record twice. But if ever there was a time to think about creation and seasons of life…
  23. Julia comes home Friday of her first week as an early college student very excited about the fact she’d been able to go to the bookstore. She used her own money to buy something, which she presented almost reverently: a daily planner. Oh, life.
  24. Played a good amount of golf this summer. I still need plenty of practice. The best part: finding a way to play golf where it really doesn’t matter how I play. It’s better to just play with people who are fun to be around.
  25. I have a growing suspicion that our kids’ generation (or maybe their kids) will look at the idea of drinking alcohol the same way our society mostly looks at smoking now. The grandkids might say, can you believe my grandfather used to think having a glass of wine was healthy?
  26. It is not Cheers, but the brew-pub on campus closed this week. There are two other locations, but losing the place I could walk to and most days find a pal or two is sad. Maybe it was Cheers, except they all had terminal degrees.
  27. I’ve taken to spending a lot of mornings in Starbucks, though, which is another form of Cheers. I got to know the baristas there over the summer, when things on campus were very, very quiet. They know my order. Dark roast. I see folks in the coffeehouse that I don’t get to see otherwise. It’s good to connect, to see all the work that gets done, to remind yourself why we do these things.
  28. The iPhone has a little tab on my screen that pops up photos, sort of a memories style thing. The other day, Julia sees one of herself as a much younger kid, and she asked me to airdrop it to her. I do. I thumb to the next photo, and she gets excited and wants that, too. I send her a lot of photos. I realize that when I was a kid, my parents took pictures of me with a camera, and they had those photos developed and printed, and they put them in albums. I could pick up those albums and look at them. Now all those photos just live on my phone, only accessible by me. It made me think about how we document our lives, how we share that, the importance of remembering your history, even if you’re fourteen.
  29. I mean, that’s what this is, you know? Just documenting time, writing down the stories here and there, because they’re important, even if they don’t feel that way in the moment.
  30. There’s an increasing list of things I haven’t been able to make time to do. If anything regularly gives me pangs of anxiety, it’s that kind of stuff. One example: the landscaping has reached a point that it’s officially overgrown. The hedges need to be halved. Some probably should come out. I don’t have time, and I ought to just hire somebody to come through and do it all. I haven’t had time to even call somebody.
  31. Nobody gets more time than anyone else. It’s all the same.
  32. Seasons of life that feel this busy can be hard on a marriage. There’s glory in having been married twenty-two and a half years. A lot of shared history. A lot of seasons. A fundamental trust that we both know it won’t always be this busy. Make time where you can. Cherish it. Go for walks.
  33. I go to the gym to try to build muscle tone. The other day I had a super sore shoulder after my regular hour-long workout. I played pickleball a couple weeks ago with coworkers. Afterward, my left knee barked at me. This is nothing extraordinary. It is so important to keep doing the things. In twenty years, now will feel like the fountain of youth.
  34. At the top of the year, I put the standing desk in my office in its full, upright, standing position. I moved my desk chair into a corner and put my backpack on it. Sure, I sit down at work, but I sit down a lot less than I used to.
  35. When all of the students come back to campus, and the marching band is practicing over in the stadium, and I walk out at the end of the day and can hear them playing in this heavenly echoing noise that bounces off the mountains and over the buildings to where I am, there is so much joy. When I see the women’s soccer team on the field running and fighting–soccer is such a physical game–and I get to see the kids hanging their hammocks, and I get to see the kids moving in…
  36. The number of friends of mine who have kids in college here at Western continues to grow. If having a kid in high school/early college officially makes me feel old, I know what’s gonna happen in four more years.
  37. On Prime Day, I ordered a big purple Nalgene water bottle, which I try to fill twice with water and consume. Drinking two liters of water is incredibly easy. I keep my seltzers in someone else’s office fridge, and that has reduced my reliance on drinking a bunch of them.
  38. I crave the one-on-one moments with the kids. The front seat on the way anywhere is magic.
  39. These days the primary tension in my life is balancing my own internal need to make sense of things, to see the organization and the strategy, and the growing understanding I have of the world that desperately little makes sense, and not much adheres to any organizational standard.
  40. Wisdom is found in knowing all of the things you don’t know, right?
  41. Back in the spring, one of Kelly’s friends stayed in the apartment and reported back that she suspected something was living in the attic. It turned out to be a raccoon, a mama raccoon specifically, who had chewed her way into the attic and begun a family in the corner over the bathroom. Nothing is more amusing than watching an English major figure out how to convince a wild raccoon to leave an attic, then to repair the hole it left behind. We are all going to die, none of us gets more time in a day, life is busy, but sometimes a damned raccoon eats its way into your attic and you have to deal with it.
  42. I miss New Jersey. My family who live there, of course, not necessarily the state itself, although something there is that I love about the place. At the start of the summer, a friend at work had a friend visit who happened to be from roughly the same place I’m from in NJ, someone who knew all the same places I know and love, and it was wonderful, like meeting someone you’ve known for years.
  43. I eat a yogurt at the end of the day a lot of days. Probiotics. I drink a decaf coffee before bed. I do the Wordle, the New York Times mini crossword, and Connections. I am actually 1,000 years old.
  44. Mostly I pray that I’m enough, that I’m not too much of a curmudgeon, that you know I love you, that you know you can always ask me anything, that you know I’ll listen when you need that the most. That I am trying as hard as I can.