March 2009 Archives

Today is the 9,999th day of my life. Number 10,000 has me excited. I’m even throwing a small party, and I never do birthday parties and the like. (The only trouble is that the 10,000th day of my life falls on April 1, so I have to convince people that this isn’t an April Fool’s joke. It’s not.) According to Wikipedia, nothing interesting happened the day I was born, but on the day after, Luke and Laura got married on General Hospital. So I got here just in time.

The Civilization series of games have always thrilled me. They’re turn-based strategy games, which means that you get a turn to adjust policy and shuffle your people around on the world map, and then your rival(s) get a turn. Et cetera. The games are complex. The history of a civilization can take days of real-world time to finish. I’m always amazed when I come to the end of the game and see that all my conquest, defeat, rising, and falling took place in the course of a few hundred turns. That’s it? How is that possible that I achieved so much in so few turns?

It’s tempting to think the opposite way on this 10,000th-day thing. Ten thousand is a big number. Perhaps the natural thought is, “I should have achieved a lot more by now.” But no, I feel the same way about 10,000 days as I do about Civilization’s 500 turns. On Day 1, I was a dumb, stupid infant who soiled himself regularly. On Day 9,999, I am a smart adult who almost never does. I’ve come a long way, baby.

Around Day 1,400 or so, I used a computer for the first time. On Day 4,947, I lost in the sixth round of the National Spelling Bee after misspelling “antonomasia.” On Day 2,161, Bob Barker walked out on stage with gray hair, so I realized that heroes age. On Day 5,985, I wrote a letter to the first girl I fell in love with, begging her not to forget about me while she was on a months-long camping trip. It didn’t work.

On Day 7,868, my dad hugged me after I received an award, and he spoke of his recently dead father, and I understood why people work all their lives to make their parents proud. On Day 6,369, I saw George Carlin live and could not wipe away the tears of laughter fast enough. On Day 8,689, Jon Stewart slapped my back and said, “Nice job, Teti!” I would not have guessed that on Day 9,167, I would leave The Daily Show without knowing entirely why.

On Day 9,378, my best friend from high school wrote me a note saying, “every time I think about how we’ve grown apart it kills me,” but what really killed us was the knowledge that we could never return to Day 5,203, when we goofed off so much in Spanish class that we were sent to the dean’s office, or Day 6,166, when we went bowling. Somewhere around Day 4,100, my big brother played Super Mario Kart for the first time, beat me, and then declared he would retire undefeated. He never played me again. I learned the art of committing to a bit.

On Day 7,019, an envelope slipped out of a stack of newspapers that a New York CNN staffer named Carolyn was taking to the trash. The envelope contained my résumé. Had Carolyn held the stack of newspapers with her other hand, my next 3,000 days would have been something different.

On Day 7,268, I met a pretty girl in a Belle & Sebastian T-shirt. My first thought was, “She’s out of my league.” On Day 8,419, I asked the girl to marry me. It worked.

Day 10,000 will be a good day.