Last night was fun – I went to a birthday party for my friend Marina, who is feeling acutely the ravages of time – at age 25.  About 20 or 30 of her friends showed up, and since we run in some of the same circles, I knew all but about three of the guests.  It was really nice to catch up with everyone.  I had intended to snap a lot more photos, but you get to talking and you forget anything else but the person in front of you.

Me and Tom.  It was really great to see him last night.

Adam and Marina

Tony, his wife Alex, and Buzz

Heather and Adam

Also present, but not caught on camera: aviel, dacort, jmartenstein, corwynamber, roberte3, npost, mjkaiser, egrigg9000 (Happy birthday Beth!), and a few others I’m probably forgetting.  Oh, galtthedog made an appearance.  No chickens however.

Last night the dynamic duo from TechFlash, John Cook and Todd Bishop, hosted a couple hundred people at Spitfire to celebrate the anniversary of the TechFlash launch and get a little holiday cheer on.  I was there representing Seattle 2.0 as part of the trivia team contest.  I joined Seattle 2.0 founder Marcelo Calbucci, Brian Westbrook, and Shauna Causey and twelve other teams in coming up with answers to a couple dozen questions, some of which were easy (where did Microsoft move from in 1979?*) to the incredibly difficult (which original blogging service started out of a Mercer Hall dorm room?*)

Overall our team did fairly well – somewhere in the middle of the pack, I think – but the big winners were Ben Huh and the Cheezburger team, who tied for 1st but won the grand prize based on a tiebreaking question – how many “shakes” has the Urbanspoon iPhone app had as of November?*.  Congrats cheezburgers, and now stop idling your days away reading TechFlash and get back to work giving me pictures of cats perched on the toilet with the caption “I HAZ CATSTIPATION”. lol.

The Spitfire was an excellent choice for a venue – it was crowded, but not OMG-I-can-see-down-your-ear-canal crowded, and the Spitfire staff were busy and helpful.  There was a hosted bar for the first hour, and the buffet was, as my friend Marina Martin would say, nom.  Of course with my ongoing fitness quest I ate fruit, but…

I really liked meeting some new people last night, and the crowd was different than some of my regular stops, so I’ll be going back to future TechFlash events for certain.  Everyone was in a fun, friendly, networking frame of mind.  Until the trivia contest started – then the kid gloves came off and the competitive fires started burning white-hot.

You can go to the TechFlash site to view pictures from the event, and also check out the livestream from the back room.

Thanks to John and Todd for contributing their time and energy to yet another great Seattle tech event!  And thanks to the sponsors for their contributions – Reaxion, BDO Seidman, Denali Advanced Integration, and the UW-Bothell MBA program.

* answers: Albuquerque, LiveJournal, and 413.2 million, respectively

Much like exercise, I’m beginning to get to that point where if I don’t write every day I start to feel like something is missing.  Even a simple little blog post can scratch that itch.

So – what’s up in Anthony-land?  Anthonyville?  Anthonytropolis?  Not much, and yet everything.  I had a birthday yesterday – if you haven’t yet sent in your present, SHAME ON YOU , and it was very nice.  Parts of the day were extra special, and – I’ll leave it at that.  I also got 10 hours of sleep last night, which helped make the day nice on a couple different levels.  Oh my god, here I go again with the cryptic narrative.  I just can’t spill my guts out all over the page EVERY DAY or pretty soon you’d go back to reading Scoble or Pavlina or god knows who else, out of sheer disgust.

I had a good day.  I’ll stop there.  But let me repeat: it was good.  That’s unusual, and welcome.  I want to bottle it and apply it in short bursts throughout the week.

I’ve been working yesterday afternoon and this morning on a side project that involves digging through level after level of superfluous complexity that puts everything else I’ve ever seen to shame.  I saw a Coen Brothers film recently, a bad one, called “A Serious Man”, and one of the characters is developing a mathematical probability theory in a book he calls The Mentaculus.  The book is really just page after page of scribbled numbers in various patterns – lists, columns, whirls, vortices, spirals.  To look at it is to immediately wish one were taking hallucinogenic drugs, in hopes of discovering The Secret To The Universe.  Anyway, this code I’m looking at reminds me of The Mentaculus.  I’m imagining the guy who wrote it wears an Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and wears two pairs of glasses at a time, just in case. I only have the benefit of two dry cappuccinos to help me navigate the waters.  I’m slowly going insane.

I’m looking forward to working more tonight and this weekend.  Now that I’ve half-cracked the code, I can start to feel productive and hopefully get in that flow state.  I may take some time Saturday morning to go on a long bike ride, if it’s not too rainy.  I have a couple destinations in mind, and will have to make some plans before I go to bed on Friday.  Can I do 50 miles this weekend?  Why not?  I can do anything.

Everything else?  What’s the French word for shit?  Merde?  Yeah, that.  So I’m focusing on what’s good, what I can control, and what I can revel in, take delight in, and what I can do for others.  The secret to  happiness is not absence of merde; it’s accepting the notion that despite the merde, there are still areas of your life that are good; friendships that make you happy; circumstances that one can appreciate; needs of others that you can fill.

So I’m working on it.  Wish me luck.   Hope you’re having a great day!

Tomorrow, November 4th, I turn 38.  Another milestone, although birthdays become FAR less important as you get older, and especially when you have kids and all the household birthday-energy gets transferred to making their birthdays the special occasions.

But as a milestone, it naturally lends itself to questions like “what has happened in the past year?” “what’s been good?” “what’s been not-so-good?” and so on.

I can say with the straightest of faces that this has been perhaps the most turbulent year of my life, for a variety of reasons. Some of the items have been so personal that even an open-the-kimono blogger like me avoids discussing them, while others are what you might call fit for public consumption.  It doesn’t really matter the reasons.  Whether or not I could describe my year as “The Greatest Story Ever Told” or “Les Miserables”, a finished book is still in some sense a finished book, no matter what words were printed on its pages.  And I would really like to shelve this  book and move on to #38, hopefully with fewer repeat performances and more … newness.  More excitement.  More inspiration.  More mutuality.  More …. lots more of a lot of things.  The list is endless, and personal.

I will say one thing that went exceedingly well for me this past year – my fitness program.  That is one new thing I’ll carry over to the next year without question.  I’ve also made some wonderful new friends which I’m very grateful for.  I’ve been blogging very consistently and frequently.  I’ve learned a lot of new things in my profession and made a lot of great contacts.  I’ve excelled at my job.  I’ve been karmically rewarded with two very happy, healthy kids in whom I take the utmost delight.

Yet thinking about it further, maybe the best thing that happened to me was a novel, never-before-experienced sense of self-discovery.  I’ve always been introspective, but this year I probed depths that I didn’t even suspect existed. I learned a TON about myself, both during how I dealt with good times as well as bad times.  I learned (relearned?) what’s important to me.  I have a renewed sense of who I am, what I need, and what I want.  I think I still have a ways to go in terms of improving my ability to act on my convictions, but I’ve come a long way.

What’s not gone so well?  Better not to dwell on the negatives.  Acknowledge, yes; obsess, no.  There are too many opportunities in life to make oneself unhappy that one shouldn’t go around borrowing trouble.  I do hope, and suspect, that many of the lessons learned in year 37 will stick with me for a long time.

I’m too old and cynical to hope that tomorrow, when I wake up, everything will have changed for the better, all the leaves turned over, all the dust swept out from the recesses of my mind.  All I can hope is that tomorrow is better than today, and that the day after that will be better still; like a retirement fund, happiness is sometimes a long-term proposition and one has to be patient and wait out rough spots and have enough confidence that one can make it through to the other side as unscathed as best as one can.  So let’s hope that we’ve experienced the bottom of the market and that the bull market has already begun.

What do I want for my birthday?  Ah, if I told, then according to the birthday-wish tradition, those things most certainly wouldn’t come to pass.  But what I want is impossible for the moment anyway.  So I won’t dwell on wanting; instead, I’ll turn my focus to appreciating those things in my life that are already true, already make me happy and already make sense.