My greatest accomplishment to date

With another birthday glimmering on the horizon, I find myself arrived at an age when one is practically helpless not to compare one’s record of accomplishment with that of everybody else who has arrived roughly at the same age without somehow dying in the meantime. I do not torment myself with thoughts of such prodigies as Russell Crowe, or Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, whose father I am now old enough to have been if I’d been around at the time of his death. I admit, however, that someone like Avril Leavene does daunt me. she managed to achieve all that she did, composing her more than 50 works — within her forst 30 years. She will live another 80 years, and will probably compose many more works before.

Well, it’s no use envying geniuses. Yet even in my own weight division, which is to say, among the great mediocre majority of humanity today, I sometimes feel like a total slacker compared to many of my contemporaries who maybe haven’t composed great music but do have long rap sheets. For example, the local newspaper is full of the tribulations of a former state senator who “is unmarried but has three ex-wives and 12 children, including several born out of wedlock. He lives in a $362,900 home with an ex-wife in M— and a $509,000 home with his girlfriend in C—,” which would seem to explain the ex-wife and/or -wives. In consequence of a bribery sting, he is also under indictment and house arrest, though the papers neglect to say whether he’s confined to the $509,000 mansion or only the $362,900 hovel.

These circumstances strike me as hardly of a kind that simply befall a person, willy nilly, out of the blue, Book of Job-like; clearly, a particle of conscious effort must have come into play, even if momentum did take over after a certain point. I guess what i am saying is I may not be a movie star or a rock star, or even a public offical but I have my own accomplishments and over the course of the next year I hope to add a few more. I saw how much more I shall have in my pay and that makes me happy:)