happy birthday dear mkromd. happy birthday to you.

On April 10, 2010, I published mkromd’s first post. Had it been a birth announcement instead of a blog, it’d have been easy to see how my project was progressing. With writing, it’s not that simple. There isn’t a, “What to Expect the First Year” book, so I have no idea what the benchmarks for success and failure are. However, what I do know is that I gained twenty pounds and don’t have a toddler to blame it on. That said, since there isn’t an infant involved, it has to be better to have gotten stretch marks than sore nipples - because I’m not sure I’d know how to explain that... to anyone. But, as always, I digress.

The point is that, the other night, as we were getting hit by a thunderstorm, I decided that if I couldn’t track my growth as a writer, I could at least track it as a human being. And so, instead of logging into the back end and checking mkromd’s analytics, I started with the first post and read each and every one of them in order. To quote the late, great Selma Diamond of it’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, “I laughed. I cried. It became a part of me.”

I just wish the part of me that it went to wasn’t my ass.

At any rate, if there’s anything I learned from that exercise, it’s that the French are right… "plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.” The more things change, the more they stay the same.

- I still have a bat-shit crazy puppy who eyeballs me while masturbating on her dog bed. What's new is that she now has an all-glass sunroom and does it for the neighbors to watch. Because the sunroom is near the kitchen, I like to think of it as dinner and a show.

- I still have TB (the friend not the disease), but I'm told that a shot of penicillin can cure both.

- I still write mercilessly about my partner, my family, and my closest friends, albeit anonymously. However, I think my mother speaks for all of them when she tells me, “Honey, if you can't annoy somebody, there's little point in writing.”

And though I would tell you that I write because it saves me $100 a week in therapy bills, I'd be lying if I didn't say that her argument has merit. And that would be wrong, because birthdays aren't just about getting older, they're also about growing up. Talk to you next week.