Live at Twenty Five

I was gonna write a reflective post on my birthday yesterday like I always do, but I guess others already did it for me.  Scratch that.  I wrote a reflective post when I turned 23, but not last year when I turned 24 because, well, my mom nearly died from gall stones that were overflowing from her gall bladder and about to make it pop.  I don’t remember exactly which day she was in surgery, but my birthday, just another day, meant nothing while the life of the most important person to me hung in the balance.  What may be most incomprehensible to people outside my family is the fact that both before and after the surgery, my mom was more concerned with if I had food to eat and detailing to people how to take care of my daily needs.  As some of you may know, I was still in the worst condition I’ve ever been in, and if my mom had passed away that weekend I probably would’ve been gone shortly thereafter.  That’s just the way our lives have been tied together all my life.  As I look back, it was not just my mom and I who were battling with the grim reaper himself last year but my grandpa on one side of the family, my grandma on another side, my dad’s brother with a life threatening stroke which he’s still recovering from paralysis, and a close family friend of ours in Taiwan who needed extensive open heart surgery.

On Sunday, a friend of mine asked me how I was gonna celebrate my birthday.  I said I didn’t know.  Not because I hadn’t realized it was my birthday, everyone’s aware of their own birthdays!  If I had wanted something special I would’ve planned it if no one did it for me.  The truth is, just being able to wake up today is a miracle to me.  Life, like your driver’s license, is a privilege and not a right.  I don’t know why my life and those I love were spared last year, but I’ve tried to celebrate that everyday and show my appreciation by living and working as hard as I could this year.  I’ve done much better than I hoped learning how to trade the stock market, with a stock blog that’s not as b.s. as I thought, because sites like SeekingAlpha.com, FeedTheBull.com, as well as big names like Reuters.com, Yahoo Finance, and Google Finance have all picked up my posts.  I’ve made some of my closest friends just in this past year, and I would’ve been very disappointed if I had never known them.  Being able to make the trip last weekend was a confirmation of how much my health improved in just a year.  All these things are more amazing and wonderful than anything I could’ve wished for over blown birthday candles.   If I had a blessing coming my way this birthday, I’ll pass it on to all my neighbors down here in SoCal who are losing their homes to the fires and no doubt in life threatening situations (not just from fires but sick people in hospitals can’t take all this smoke or power outages).  And no, I didn’t have a birthday cake or candles, so the fire have nothing to do with me…except that they’re suffocating me!  I have enough blessings, other people need it more than I do.  If you’re my age and thinking, what’s wrong with this guy?  Why isn’t he hitting the bars and getting hammered on his 25th birthday?  To you I say, I pray one day you’ll reread this post and see what I mean.