Father and Son Timeline

My dad will turn seventy-eight this year. I'm to visit my parents this fall. I just realized that my dad is almost eighty. One gets up to that age, and whether a visit across the country will prove to be the last becomes a somber possibility. After all, the average man in the United States only lives to be seventy-six.

Now that I'm firmly ensconsed in middle age, I thought it would be interesting to review the age the two of us were at various times in our lives. When I was younger and my dad went through certain things, I thought him an "old man"; now I'm not too far behind him when certain things occurred. So let's see.

I married much later and took on parenting at the same time, so that rather skews the chronology.

Still, what's interesting is that when our first child graduates high school next year, I will be about the same age my father was when I graduated high school. As I noted, it seemed to me then that my dad was so old; now, it seems he was quite young. And when he lost his job of twenty-five years, he was only a decade older than I am now (and started his with longest-term employer roughly the same age as I started with my current employer)--at the time, he seemed much closer to retirement to me. Alas, that was another decade or so (not sure if he retired at sixty-two or sixty-five) away.

My Life in Weeks

So I came across an interesting Web site that breaks down people's lives in weeks. Looking at the charts on there was sort of humbling, seeing how short our lives our and how long periods of time are really just a set of weeks that we string together.

Having looked at those charts, I figured I'd do my own. First, I plotted out some major points in my life--beginning dates were circled. That kind of points out important times, but to get a real feel for how long certain things have been as relative to my whole life I opted to color the squares.

When I do, some things become really evident. I've been at my current workplace a long time--longer than just about any other string. I have been there longer than I went to grade school through high school (when I add in college, however, I have still spent more of my life in school than at my current employer).

If I look at the color blocks at time in particular states, the blue is formidable, but it still has a long ways to go before catching up to what the California bar would be--pretty much all the boxes before the yellow section. But if I put the yellow, green, and blue together--time out of California--it looks like more time than I've spent in Cali. That's an illusion, caused by how much I've broken California time up. Still, I'm getting close; give it three more years, and I'll have been out of my birth state longer than I was in it.

School life it appears still takes up more of my life than work-only life, but if one considers that I was working during the time I went to college, then the story is quite different.

Anyway, below are the charts.

Time from Submission to First Publication Each Year

September is generally the beginning of submission season, given how many journals don't take submissions in the summer. Each year, after a few months of submitting materials to publications, I begin to become anxious. It feels as if I will not get any acceptances this year. I wanted to see how real that observation has been in the past, how long that anxiousness usually stays in place. Below is a chart showing when the first submission (after September 1) was accepted for each year:

The worst I've done since I started submitting in greater amounts, it appears, is December--my first year. Prior to 2008, I submitted only seven things at a time, which meant I usually submitted about twenty times per year (and had no acceptances between 2001 and 2007). In 2008, I increased that number to about forty things out at once, which meant I collected about 140 rejections (and a handful of acceptances) per year. Surprisingly, in that six-year span, acceptances came in September three times.

However, since 2013, publication has been very spotty (some new published works appeared in 2014, but they were accepted quite a bit of time before then; no new work has appeared this year). This is for several reasons. The year 2013-14 was not itself a good year for acceptances--I had an acceptance in November, but the publication went out of business before publishing the work it had accepted, so my first acceptance leading to actual publication after September 2013 wasn't until January of 2014. Further publications through 2013-14 proved slim (just one more acceptance), and publications/acceptances in 2014-15 were nonexistent.

The latter was mostly because I stopped submitting for fifteen months starting in April 2014 (which is usually when my submission period for a given year begins to wind down anyway), after my marriage, deciding to devote a year to just being with my new wife (which is one reason this blog has become irregular and infrequent in its postings). She's gone off to law school now, and I've managed to carve out a tiny bit of time to write and submit again, so I got back to the submission process this September, but with sending out just about twenty things at a time instead of forty to make the workload more manageable. This, however, will probably mean even fewer acceptances.

Alas, what I've written since 2013 has mostly been longer work or kids' stuff, so there aren't a lot of new stories and poems, which have made up the bulk of my acceptances, to share. Plenty of good pieces I've never managed to get published are still going out, at least as I see it, but perhaps there are reasons editors haven't liked these particular works. (Then again, some works have been rejected repeatedly and then found amazing homes, so it does seem something of a whim what gets accepted and what not.)

Fights with Girlfriend

She's the first official girlfriend I've had, me at age forty-three. I've tried before with other gals but have always been rejected before we reached the exclusivity stage. Things with this gal have been stormy, especially since exclusivity. A lot of it's my own fault, my own indecisiveness and anxiousness about the relationship, which I'm frustrated by. I really want things to work, so why do I keep sabotaging it?

Trips to Boston

I visited Boston in October on a research and work trip. It was my fourth time to the area and the first in a decade. Here are the times I've visited Boston in the past:

I love Boston. I almost moved there at one point. But I don't know that I'd actually like living there. I've always visited in the fall--never had to endure the weather. And it's superexpensive.

Women in My Life as an Adult

Until about a week ago, I'd never had an official girlfriend--that is, a girl I was seeing exclusively who was also seeing me exclusively, with an eye toward marriage (sometimes I've had an eye on a gal and spent time with her and not had anyone else in my life, but when we finally got to "the talk," I've always learned she just saw me as a friend; likewise, there have been a few times when I had more than one gal in my life, which led to my own inability to be decisive, and I ended up losing out on all the women, usually in quick succession--something that almost happened to me again this past spring). Anyway, I was talking the other day with a rather consistent phone companion over the first half of 2013, and she noted that I probably always had some gal who was a friend who I spent time with to kill the loneliness. I said sometimes, but I didn't think that had been the case with me most of my adult life. Hence, I decided to do a graph to see. Below are women I averaged probably at least an hour with on the phone or in person each week during a particular span of time (these are estimates; it's likely I've undercounted time spent with a few women along the way and they're not showing up, just as I've likely overcounted time spent with a few of these women):

Pretty much, I've only had such "relationships" since graduating from college. Of those, the longest was a strictly platonic friendship--I had no romantic intentions and the woman knew this. Right around age thirty--the end of my time in Texas and the start of my time here--I had quite a few women in my life; unfortunately, none of them ended up quite suiting me. Since then, I've tried to stick to mostly spending that much time with women only when I had some real intentions toward them. It's not that I wouldn't have a platonic friendship again that involved as much time as that (or those--since most of the gals in Texas were women who I dated who turned into platonic friends) in the late 1990s; it's just that I've been more focused on trying to find someone I'd actually want to settle down with. Unfortunately, I lost out on the few women I'd gone for since about 2003, sometimes because I was unwilling to commit but most of the time because the woman didn't like me in that mysterious way. Quite a few women I've had a strong interest in don't show up here because I could only manage to get smaller snatches of time from them. Since 2010 I'd been fairly blessed by women's presence (though I keep expecting a return to a more consistently quiet and depressing time, as that has seemed more typical of my adult life).

Beard Progression

So I didn't shave for eight weeks. Here were the results by week, for weeks 3 through 8 (unfortunately, I didn't think to take photos of weeks 1 and 2):

 

Life Timeline

Some things don't go quite as one might desire. Actually, I never had much faith that I would win a Pulitzer, but it was nice to dream. However, I'm still waiting on the first book publication (many a writer ten or fifteen years younger than me has a published book now; I don't know that I ever had an age in mind, but certainly by age thirty), and on that wife (around thirty) and kids (around thirty-five). I'm forty-two now, quite a few years past those ideal ages. At least I've had steady jobs that I've mostly enjoyed, in what would have been my dream profession and in my dream location (I wanted to work as an editor at a publisher in the West or South, then later as I refined my desires, as an editor at a university press in a small university town--and that's what I do and where I live).

Jobs I've Dreamed of versus Jobs I've Had

I'd say I've done fairly well in terms of actually working in fields in which I have an interest, as can probably be surmised by the handy timeline below.
The timeline shows my main dream job at top, my main real jobs at bottom. This isn't exhaustive, though, because I have had part-time second jobs, and there have been other jobs I've dreamed of having. For example, at various times, I've thought how need it would be to be a screenwriter, an amusement park ride designer, a fruit farmer, a comedian, a radio deejay, a publisher, and a designer or compositor. In real life, I've done a little deejaying (for pay--it was not something, in the end, that I enjoyed), and I've done some design and composition and screenwriting just for fun.

But I'm blessed that the job I really desired from about my teen years on became the one that I have. I often ponder what I would do instead were I to have to choose another career, and the fact is I don't know.