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Self-portrait taken two weeks before my thirty-seventh birthday using the Leica M on loan from the Warsaw Leica store.

Self-portrait taken two weeks before my thirty-seventh birthday using the Leica M on loan from the Warsaw Leica store.

 

Today was my thirty-seventh birthday, and what made it special was that it actually wasn’t, but that this was really okay.

And you know what else? I kind of dislike odd numbers, and especially prime numbers. I like numbers you can arrange into clean grids of columns and rows: numbers with fours and eights in them, powers of two, that sort of thing. So, naturally, I just couldn’t get behind 37, not for being close to forty—because so far I have no problem with that at all—but for being such a graceless amount, made up of digits that don’t excite me, representing a sum unfavorable to attempts at neat disribution.

Luckily, and pretty remarkably, sometime midway through this clunky and ordinary birthday of mine, it occurred to me to calculate the number of months in 37 years. It is, in fact, 444 months. Imagine that! For my thirty-seventh birthday I got to celebrate turning four-hundred-and-forty-four.

Now that’s old.