Another Year Older, Another Year Wiser?

My birthday was a low key affair, which has become the norm for many years now. While we all get older, the real trick is becoming wiser as the years go by. In a culture devoted to perpetual adolescence, wisdom is dwindling. Not that we ever had enough of that valuable resource, but it is becoming even rarer.

So I hope I have learned a few things in the past year and that they have or in the future will benefit others. It does not seem I learn much for my own gain as time goes by. Since I believe we are here to serve others, it is probably for the best in the eternal scheme of things.

This week I decided to take for myself though. Using my birthday as an excuse, I have focused on me and entertaining myself instead of being productive. This is something someone healthy cannot do and probably does not need to do, but being disabled means you live a life most cannot understand. While I rant against being in a culture of “mass distraction,” it has been a deliberate exercise in it this week.

Being distracted was made easy by the release of Mass Effect 3, the conclusion of the Commander Shepherd trilogy and my present to myself. Some of the content I do not like, but the finale is a worthy ending to the epic story and the conclusion that angered a lot of fans is fine with me. Especially since it appears to be more open ended than they perceive to allow for DLC packs to come. It is a grim story, with the destruction of worlds making that unavoidable. Fortunately, that sense of friendship and personal intimacy with other characters is still intact. Hate the new cover system, it got me killed more times than I can count.

As is tradition, my dad and I went out for crab legs on my birthday. Back when my mother was alive, our birthdays were slightly more than a week apart so we would celebrate that way between them. Amazingly, I did not overstuff myself this year.

Thanks to my sister, I have the Blu-ray of my all time favorite movie coming. Akira Kurosawa’s Ran is a true masterpiece and, in my eyes, superior to Seven Samurai. My first DVD purchase was of this movie, more than a year before I had a DVD-ROM player to view it with. It cost a pretty penny back then, around $35.00 and looked like it was lifted from a VHS tape. No anamorphic widescreen here, just a letterboxed scan wedged into 4:3 ratio. I tried watching it on the new 40” HDTV and it looked awful. So it will be nice to see it in high definition glory.

After we succeeded in out quest for snow crab legs, we went to Blaine’s Farm and Fleet for more wood pellets. There I ran into the deluxe two disc DVD edition of Lawrence of Arabia, the one with the cloth cover on the case. It was in the surplus rack of discount DVDs and was on sale at an additional discount. Paying four dollars to replace my no frills bargain DVD was a no brainer and capped off a nice birthday.