{"id":12684,"date":"2011-08-24T05:54:10","date_gmt":"2011-08-24T10:54:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=12684"},"modified":"2017-05-01T12:02:08","modified_gmt":"2017-05-01T16:02:08","slug":"ding-40","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=12684","title":{"rendered":"Ding 40!"},"content":{"rendered":"

So today, I turn 40. Where do I go to get my mount?<\/p>\n

This has been an interesting journey. I was born at about the same time as the personal computer, although I wouldn’t be aware of them for almost a decade. Here at 40, I’m writing [approximately] every day to tens of thousands of people all over the world, using a computer that is more powerful than the combined processing of every computer that existed before 1971. I could name a lot of other everyday technologies that would have stunned the people of 1971, but they’re all a bit modest in comparison to the one-two-punch of personal computer + internet. I got to see it happen, which was kind of special. I suppose my great-grandparents have me beat, seeing the rise of sanitation, ubiquitous electricity, indoor plumbing, modern medicine, and the automobile. But this internet thing is a close second. <\/p>\n

Anyway. Birthday. For the next week or so I’m going to be doing something different. I’m going to write about my life. It will be a sort of an abridged autobiography, in the form of a series of blog posts. <\/p>\n

At one point my father taught a creative writing course at Slippery Rock University<\/a>. On the first day, he went around the room and had each person say why they wanted to take this class, or what they were hoping to write. At one point a young man said he planned to write his autobiography. <\/p>\n

My dad looked down at this twenty-year old kid and said, “Okay, but who is going to give a shit?”<\/p>\n

That’s my father. We’ll talk more about him later.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, I don’t really have a good answer to his question. I don’t know that anyone is interested in reading my story. It’s not particularly exotic, heartwarming, insightful, or gut-wrenching. It’s just a bunch of stuff that happened to one human being, just like everyone else’s story. <\/p>\n

My father was also a poet. His work was short and mostly free-form verse. He had a dear friend, Greg, who wrote these epic poems that went on for pages and pages. Dad used to tell him, “If it’s more than half a page, it’s not poetry. It’s therapy.” There’s some truth in that, and I’m sure it applies to a lot of art. Any serious expression of emotion is likely the artist working through or trying to understand something in their own experience.<\/p>\n

I will not be offended if you skip these autobiographical posts. I might even be relieved. I’m writing them for my own benefit, and if you get anything out of them, then understand it is an unintended side-effect of my grappling with my own past, trying to set it all in order before it’s forgotten. Life is short, and (statistically speaking) mine is more than halfway over.<\/p>\n

So now that we have that out of the way….<\/p>\n

Happy Birthday to me! Wheeee!<\/p>\n

shamus_1981_birthday.jpg<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n

Here I am, turning 10. It would be a quarter century before anyone would look at this cake and think to make a joke about it being a lie. So I had that going for me. On the other hand, that wallpaper! Ugh.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So today, I turn 40. Where do I go to get my mount? This has been an interesting journey. I was born at about the same time as the personal computer, although I wouldn’t be aware of them for almost a decade. Here at 40, I’m writing [approximately] every day to tens of thousands of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[610],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12684","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-landmarks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12684","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12684"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12684\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12684"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12684"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12684"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}