I Survived My Jesus Year: How I lived to age 34 without incinerating in a dumpster fire

I recently completed another revolution around the sun and turned 34.  This won't strike you as a significant development.  Time works the same way for everyone.  Hooray for me, hooray for you.  We all have birthdays, and except for ages 18 and 21, which come with legal milestones, birthdays that don't end in 5 or 0 don't usually warrant much fanfare.  However, making it past age 33 means that one has outlived perhaps the most famous person in the Western world, Jesus H. Christ himself, which seems like it's worth taking a moment to build up a really sincere slow clap.

I'll wait.

I should offer that I'm not a religious person.  In fact, as you might surmise from the image atop this text, I am an atheist and one of the more gleefully sacrilegious people I know.  Was Jesus even a real guy?  Maybe?  Do I look like I have a time machine in my garage?  Because I don't even have a garage, champ.  But growing up in a culture steeped in Christian mythology means I'm aware of the supposed good deeds of ol' JC (not Chasez, the N'Sync guy.  I mean, he might be a stand-up guy too, but I don't know his life) and also the grisly death by crucifixion.

I may not be willing to wash a prostitute's feet (ew, yuck, feet) and I'm not a friggin' wizard so I can't turn water into wine, but I can avoid being murdered, both literally and figuratively.  I can use good judgement, self control, and the scant amount of wisdom I've accumulated over the last 33 years to avoid situations that will interfere with my safety, health, creativity, or enjoyment, and seek out opportunities to enhance my life in the aforementioned dimensions.

I don't physically feel any older than I did at say, 24, but I do feel like I've learned some life lessons and now have a more mature perspective on a few topics.  For example, I don't relate to people who say their hangovers are way worse in their 30s.  Mine are not the slightest bit worse now than they were when I was 24 or even 18.  My hangovers have always felt like a Craigslist Missed Connection (RIP) between a demonic possession and a skull fracture.

I finally figured out how to deal with a hangover, though, which is to simply use self control to avoid one in the first place.  I stopped drinking for close to 6 months and now have a personal rule that I will not consume more than 2 units of alcohol in a 24 hour span of time because I got tired of puking so hard I would burst little capillaries in my eyelids.  You might think the time I had to barf into a Nalgene in a moving vehicle, and then obviously throw out said Nalgene, would have done the trick, but no.  And that was years after the time I had to vomit into a ShopRite bag in the passenger seat of my mom's car because she made me ride with her to run errands as punishment for coming home shitfaced, and the bag turned out to have a hole in the bottom.  Cute, right?

Physically, I feel like I'm in slightly better shape than I was 10 years ago.  Despite the passage of time, I haven't yet physically declined save for the appearance of a few gray hairs.  I have come to accept that I'm not immortal or invincible, though, so when an activity seems like an un-fun level of dangerous or painful, I reserve the right to say, "Fuck that noise," and hang out on the sidelines.  Mountain Biking?  Nope.  Riding a stupid goddamn electric scooter on a city street?  Hard pass.  Getting any part of my body waxed?  Nah, I'm good.  Getting a tattoo?  Yea, you know what, probably.  But now I know better than to pick a random tattoo shop on the Wildwood boardwalk* and hand over my sketchbook to someone who speaks no English and therefore can't conduct any kind of consultation with me**, and who just happens to have an open schedule with no clients lined up so he can get me under the needle right away***.

I also picked up this pro tip:  If you do find yourself with a terrible tattoo, do your research and find a talented artist who will make it presentable as soon as you can afford to do so!  Don't be like me and let 12 years pass, during which time people will refer to you, behind your back and to your face, as Prison Tat (for obvious and not at all ambiguous reasons).

So we've covered the bases about avoiding death, dismemberment, alcohol poisoning, and Hep C.  But a life worth living isn't merely a cost-benefit analysis between fun and danger.  Rather than just abstaining from poor choices, there are plenty of ways you can enrich your life proactively!  Here is a list of things that I do anywhere from occasionally to daily to make my life more enjoyable:

• Make lists!  A to do list for the day, a list of goals, a Docket of Shit to Do, whatever you need in your life.  (OMG, this is a list!)
• Yoga 
• Studying Spanish
• Reading
• Painting
• Exercising
• Writing 
• Stand up comedy (admittedly not for everyone, and depending on who you ask, maybe not for me either, but screw you guys, it's fun)
• CBD oil - I know that medically/scientifically the jury's still out on whether this is snake oil or has legitimate healing applications, but even if it's a placebo, I do feel more relaxed after drinking hot tea with a couple drops of CBD oil up in there.  Would the ritual of hot tea by itself produce the same outcome?  Maybe!  
• Volunteer or contribute to charitable causes - or both!  I'm not saying I'm a good person, even robber barons used some of their money for laudable causes (see every Carnegie library in existence) but I'm trying to be less of a selfish, entitled garbage person who assumes somebody else will be there to clean up the world's messes, and I'm a sucker for anyone who sends me a bunch of free address labels because you know I don't have my shit together enough to actually purchase my own address labels and you also know I'm too cheap to bother with that because I never live in one place long enough to use them all.  My checks are like 3 addresses out of date and I'm hoping checks become completely obsolete before I either run out of my current book or move again, whichever comes first, so I don't have to keep dealing with this malarkey.  TL:DR:  Help people, share your resources, be nice!

All this self-evident life advice could easily be expanded to 30,000 words and published in the form of a slim but highly lucrative self help book targeted towards the younger end of the millennial demographic.  I'm really doing a mitzvah by giving it away for free, right here, right now.  In summation, be like me in some ways, and don't be like me in most ways.  You are welcome, and stay alive out there.

* Red flag #1
** Red flag #2
*** Red flag #3.  Is every 19-year old that dumb, or just me?

Drinking in moderation, the birthday suit edition