Today is the milestone day, turning the big three-oh. I am spending it in my housecoat at home, and then quite possibly later on going to someone else’s birthday party as well as a reunion party for the Cannibal cast.
I’m kind of caught between wanting to downplay the morbid significance of the occasion and embracing the landmark that it is. I don’t feel remarkably older, and most people are spinning the positive side of it… I think my favourite comment I’ve received over the Internet is from improv legend Joe Bill, who I’m not especially close to but I’ve taken several classes with and was kind enough to drop me a note saying “congrats on surviving the Dumbass Decade”.
The theme for this week was, coincidentally, “survival”… I had a stomach bug early on which took a lot out of me, and then got passed on to my girlfriend and took even more out of her, so much so that I had to take her to the E.R. on Wednesday, causing us to miss both the holiday party at Unexpected Productions (which I was totally psyched for) and a holiday show that our friends had set aside an extra Wednesday performance just so those of us with heavy schedules could make it. We are both much better now, but it took a pretty significant toll.
Not so fortunate, however, is my poor laptop, a MacBook Pro that I co-purchased with my then-employer back in 2007. It has been having trouble playing DVDs since, well, forever. I got the DVD drive replaced several months ago but surprisingly the troubles quickly came back. Still under AppleCare, I took it back a second time when I had a DVD that I could consistently reproduce the problem on within the first ten seconds of it playing. I left the DVD with them while they ordered and replaced the drive for a second time, and when I returned I thankfully had the foresight to try it out in the store, only to confirm that replacing the DVD drive hadn’t fixed the problem.
I then spent about an hour in the store with their technician, who suspected it was a problem with the memory and was trying out various configuration of memory in the device. At the end he concluded it wasn’t in fact the memory but the logic board, which meant ordering yet another part to be replaced. I left the DVD with them again, and when I got the call and returned for a third time I was incredibly frustrated to try the DVD only to find it still crashing within the first ten seconds.
I explained to them that my issue wasn’t that they were having difficulty fixing this problem so much as each time they called me and said it was fixed I returned only to try it out myself and find out that replacing the part hadn’t fixed anything, and if they had so much as tried the DVD themselves (which is why I had left it with them) then they could have saved me a trip to Bellevue Square which, at Christmas-time, isn’t exactly a holiday.
After admitting that they had dropped the ball and didn’t know exactly what was wrong with my computer they (finally) decided to replace it, so the good news is that I will be getting a brand new MacBook Pro with even slightly better specs than the one I have right now. The bad news is that I might not be receiving it in time for my next scheduled trip to San Jose. I received a call from the manager today and as penance for their errors and putting me in a bind he’s going to cover new AppleCare on my machine and throw in a backup drive as well, so at least that’s good.
The rest of the week has been ok, illness notwithstanding. My Theatresports team won last Friday by a single point against a very formidable team, although I think they did better narrative work than we did. Unfortunately we didn’t come back yesterday because the regular teams were usurped by special teams celebrating the departure of one of our ensemble members. We’re supposed to come back again, but with the Christmas holiday and then the new year frankly I don’t know how that’s going down.
On Thursday I was treated to a surprise birthday party that I knew about in advance, on account of the E.R. visit on Wednesday and scepticism as to whether or not it would still be happening. It was really nice to see people there from all walks of my life, and I am grateful to everyone who made it out to it.
It feels weird having left my twenties behind. They had their ups and their downs and in many ways were very successful and in other ways not so much… I am sad for the failures that were most profound, the wasted days and missed opportunities, and feel a strange sense of mourning for the closing of a chapter that I am no longer writing but instead has been written, and knowledge that the last chances to make any alterations to it have finally slipped away.
But then, there is every reason to believe that thirty will be the best year of them all so far, so I shall be happy. After all, having written the past is a small price to pay to get to write the future.
Dan.
