{"id":3993,"date":"2015-10-09T20:25:59","date_gmt":"2015-10-10T03:25:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/?p=3993"},"modified":"2015-10-09T20:25:59","modified_gmt":"2015-10-10T03:25:59","slug":"hitching-a-ride-into-club-33-at-sea-10-05-2015","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/?p=3993","title":{"rendered":"Hitching a Ride into Club 33 \u2013 At Sea \u2013 [10-05-2015]"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"hitchingaride\"<\/a>I keep my birthdays quiet on ships. I always have. I don\u2019t like to see my name and ID photo splashed across the bulletin screens with the prompt to send me best wishes; I don\u2019t tell the \u2018Cats singer for fear that she\u2019ll announce it over the mic at the set, and I always tell the team not<\/em> to throw me a party. This particular team might fight me on that, I\u2019m not sure\u2026I can never quite<\/em> tell whether or not my coworkers are serious\u2026<\/p>\n

But I\u2019m just not a party person.<\/p>\n

So instead the culinary host commissioned a small (and extremely yummy) chocolate birthday cake for me, and Amras and I had dinner at the Italian restaurant onboard. Nice and quiet.<\/p>\n

As I\u2019ve gotten older, birthdays have become more intimate occasions than public ones. My friends on the team know, the barista at my office coffee shop knows (so she can give me free coffee\u2026plus, I do consider her a friend), my boss knows, and obviously Amras knows, though he pretends to forget \u2013 or to purposely try and put my birthday on the wrong day.<\/p>\n

This birthday feels a little\u2026surreal. For one thing I\u2019m celebrating it in the middle of the sea \u2013 literally \u2013 we\u2019re just over halfway through our trans-pacific crossing. It\u2019s always a bit of an odd experience; I suspect it always will be.<\/p>\n

32 was a good year, I was quite content to be 32. I suspect I will be quite content to be 33 \u2013 except I\u2019m not 33, I\u2019m 29 with a couple of years interest \ud83d\ude09 Seriously though, 32 was good to me, confusing but good. Every year is its own emotional rollercoaster, and I have come to realize over time that it\u2019s really just what you make of it.<\/p>\n

Its\u2019 true that I\u2019m not\u2026perhaps\u2026where I thought I would be at 33. I don\u2019t think anyone ever is. I look back now at the person I thought I would become and realize I\u2019m not even remotely sure whether I would have been pleased with that outcome. It doesn\u2019t matter really, because I ended up somewhere else. As so many of us do.<\/p>\n

After all, you just never know where those train tracks are going to take you; and birthdays are odd things \u2013 they don\u2019t really matter all that much, they\u2019re just a signpost along the side of the tracks, a way of remembering where you\u2019ve been and how long you\u2019ve been there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I keep my birthdays quiet on ships. I always have. I don\u2019t like to see my name and ID photo splashed across the bulletin screens with the prompt to send me best wishes; I don\u2019t tell the \u2018Cats singer for … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4,80,17,75],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3993","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-below-the-waterline","category-northern-exposure-2015","category-reflections-below-the-waterline","category-summer-contracts"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3GtNE-12p","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3993","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3993"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3993\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3995,"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3993\/revisions\/3995"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3993"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3993"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3993"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}