By the time you read this, I’ll be 38. And all that means is that I was 37 when I wrote this.

I was planning this whole post about how precious life is and how we shouldn’t wait to celebrate “milestone” birthdays…

But what’s actually been tugging at my mind is looking forward at what I want for myself in the year to come, something I’ve typically reserved for January 1st.

The problem is that it’s right after Christmas and between you and me, I’m fully in the throes of drinking wine at 10am and surviving off of a variety of cheeses and candy.

My first planner was that one from 2000 with the scratchy hologram cover everyone used to play DJ on.

And I hated using it.

We had to keep track of our assignments in it, and our class schedule, and a parent had to sign off that you both wrote your assignments down and completed them. I’m not sure if this was their attempt to teach us how to manage our own workloads or how to use a planner. If it was the latter, they totally failed. Either way, the idea of using a paper planner was NOT it for me.

Looking back, I’m not really sure how I kept everything straight in high school or college, but I made it work.

“What can I get you to drink?” The server was just doing her job, but she didn’t realize she had just walked up to a land mine. I asked for a water. He asked for a beer.

And I was dabbing tears from my eyes with a paper napkin.

All I wanted was a date. Dinner and a movie. It should have been so simple. But we had fallen into our old familiar patterns. I was absorbing responsibility for stress that didn’t belong to me. He was worrying for the sake of worry. We were upset with each other for things unsaid.

And it all spilled out before we’d even gotten our drinks.