one-thirteen-eighty-one

ok so it's almost my birthday...

i didn't really tell anyone that i work with, except for my students.

they're supposed to wear their favorite football(?) team's colors. i told them that they should wear orange and blue because those are the colors of u of i where i went to school, and it's my birthday. and i don't care if u of i had an abysmal football season. oh, and orange and blue, conveniently, are the colors of the bears.

a note on new year's resolutions: i usually hold off until my birthday (which is two weeks later) to make any kind of "resolution." but i don't usually make a big deal about them. and it's not because i think i have a low probability of acheiving them. take last year. well, 2004. september 2004 i decided that one year from then i would not be in the same position. and i achieved that a year later.

maybe i don't place so much importance on it because i'm of the school of "valentine's day is for tools" in other words, why do you need a specific date to do something when you could do it now? of course my reasons for being of the aforementioned school might have something to do with cynicism, but in the case of new years resolutions i don't really make a big deal. like i said, i make resolutions when necessary.

so maybe it would be appropriate to reflect on my first quarter-century; but i'd rather go to bed and finish retrato en sepia (by isabel allende), second novel finished this year!