July.03.07: 21

I very much enjoy these numbers

Tuesday
July
07.03.07
21
7*3 = 21
21 is one of my favorite numbers.
It looks smooth and white. It's relatively quiet. I like its personality.


And the day is an accordingly beautiful one.

I feel that my assigned numerical value has caught up with my age.
I have been engaged in a continuing process of refinement, sometimes by fire.

I wonder about the different ways by which I could've reached this age and am thankful for the things and people that have brought me to where I am.

I sometimes write notes for my future self.
Or, by then, from my past self.



It's *Tuesday
So I leave work early to bike to my tutoring job. I will go home first to get a different set of clothes and will check my email just before leaving work. In the 5 minutes it takes me to get home, I will get several new messages, one of them being
this awesome birthday card-like thing which will provoke a response of gleefully cackling laughter from me. I will reflect on how nice it is that some friends have left me pleasant messages.

Then I will have a lovely, though rushed, bike ride to NorthEast where I will explain some very nice properties of the unit circle and convenient triangles. The physics professor/tutor will notice my copy of Griffith's Introduction to Elementary Particles and will want to talk about gravity, but I won't really know enough to say anything intelligent.

After tutoring, I sit on the grass in the sun under a sunny blue sky and think about how I am a product of my experiences and of the things that other people have done for me. I wear the red patterned bandana that my brother gave me and the blue running top and shoes that my mom gave me. I sit next to the bike that a friend has let me borrow to replace my usual bike (which was given to me by my Aunt and my Mom). I will eat the snack that I brought: raspberry pie from one of my friends at work, bread that my roommate brought, and an apple (I got that one). I will watch the sky and sing to myself and to God, feeling grateful for events leading to, and carrying through this day.
Eventually, I will pick myself up out of the warm grass and head home.

On my way back, I pull over to watch a response team deal with a man who looked like he was suffering the affects of heat and recent abdominal surgery. I will donate a jar and my white bandana toward the cause of cooling him off (I need to get a new emergency bandana...). I will discover that my friends' bike has a whopping 24 gears which enables me to cause passing cars to slow down and even stop in my frame of reference. I will arrive back at my apartment to discover that my roommate wants to mix me a white russian and a good friend is there baking delicious things.

After running some errands and taking some pictures,
I will talk to my family on the phone. My mom will ask how it feels to be 21.
I'll tell her that it feels appropriate.
She will sound a little surprised at that response.






I think it was less of my first day of being 21 and more of my last day being 20.