Yes. 28. First off, thank you to everyone. I am so glad to have so many wonderful friends. You put up with me, my pedantry, my bird-gawking, my absent-mindedness, and several other faults which you are far too kind to mention. You give awesome presents, and you are generous with your time and brunch ingredients.

Many of you are older than me and have not agreed with my assessment of 28 as a “bonus year”, i.e. still in the upper twenties but not yet at the dreaded almost-30. This has a lot to do, I think, with the fact that I am pretty much the only person who thinks 27 was upper twenties. Everyone else says it’s middle, which I think is a stretch. At any rate, while lying awake one night contemplating sudoku puzzles I remembered a passage in John Crowley’s Aegypt in which he describes something called Climacterics, which happen every 7 years. It is a deeply flawed book, not least because Crowley, an incipient Gnostic, is always hinting at arcana (like Climacterics and other capitalized things) and never spilling the beans. So after reading three of the novels in that series I was forced to conclude that Gnostics are (a) no fun and (b) probably don’t actually know anything, not even Climacterics.

But in fact it turns out there is such a thing. Right now the word means menopause, so good luck getting anything out of google. In fact a climacteric is any period of major change, to the sex drive or to some other component of the personality. Stephen Maturin talks about another character’s “lesser climacteric” in Master and Commander. Apparently this notion of watershed years was pretty prevalent in pre-Freudian psychology, and it may be one explanation for why 21, of all years, was considered the age of legal majority for ages and ages. Also, it’s only the odd multiples of 7 that matter, but all the same I have a feeling being 28 is going to be of some moment.

Apropos of nothing, let me put in a plug for bloglines. It is awesome.

(cdm | LesserNonClimacteric )