2011: The Year of the Weirdly Phenomenal Birthday Wish

Speaking of Weirdly Phenomenal

On Sunday, May 1, my 36th birthday, The Squidbag wished me a "weirdly phenomenal birthday." In addition to writing "mockery, heady madness, and silver-tongued blasphemies since 2004," he is also clearly the Master of Birthday Wishery.

Weirdly phenomenal.

I couldn't imagine what it meant, or how the relatively calm day that I'd planned for myself would morph into it. Nonetheless, I excitedly accepted his wish, offered a little bring-it-on nod to the sky... and then, I crept around for the next 10 or so hours waiting for something weirdly phenomenal to pop up.

In case you missed it, last year on my birthday, the skies opened up and washed away much of the state of Tennessee. Nobody came to my birthday party because so many roads had become impassable. My kids were trapped at their father's house, 45-minutes away. We had tickets to the Nashville Symphony that night and this happened (massive flooding ruined almost everything) to the Schermerhorn Symphony Center. All day I waited, and nothing.

By 9:40 pm, the children were in bed. The wife was in the library on campus (across town) preparing for finals, and I was watching Brothers & Sisters. I sighed a subtly disappointed sigh; it looked for all the world as if my birthday wish was a dud. And then... BOOM! Osama bin Laden was dead.

The most wanted man on the planet, for most of the span of my children's lives, is found and killed on my birthday? Weirdly phenomenal. I felt shocked, ten years of... all that has happened in the last ten years. I sat there, on my couch, paralyzed by the phenomenal news, and then even more so by the weirdly celebratory nature of the posts that began to fill my Facebook newsfeed. I was quite simply overcome by it all and so, I wrote about it.


Now, there is nothing weirdly phenomenal about that at all. That is what I do: first I feel, and then I write. Sometimes I make a mess or two (or 73) in the middle, but feeling and writing are almost always where my experiences begin and end. So, I wrote a piece and posted it on my blog and went to bed.


Sometime during the night, the universe turned its weird and phenomenal gaze on that blog.


By breakfast, that post had more views than almost anything I'd ever written. By the time President and Mrs. Obama were on Oprah Monday afternoon, the post had twice as many views as my previously most read post.

Later that night... I was offered a gig as a once-a-week blogger at Care2.com. (Insert OMG! here.)

My first post, Osama Dead: This Isn't The Way, went live around lunchtime on Tuesday. I have no idea how many of their users are active in the Care2 community, but they have 15.7+ million registered users.

Phenomenal = Something I wrote was published on a website with 15.7+ million registered users.
Phenomenal = They want me to do it again next week, and again the week after that.
Phenomenal = Within 24 hours, that one post had more hits, more shares, and more comments than the collective history of my entire blogging experience. No, I'm not kidding.
Phenomenal = The people liked it (not all of the people - oh my goodness, the commenters... well, that's another post).

So, what about the "weirdly" part of my Weirdly Phenomenal Birthday Wish?

Well, I called my mom to tell her about it - my "big break" as a writer - and spent 20 minutes trying to teach her how to find my fancy article on her three-hour old iPad, and then she said, "That's a good article, Chris... So, do you think that I should have gotten any apps for this thing before I left the Apple store?"

Also, there were middle school track meets and orthodontist appointments to attend, and dinner to cook, as if things were normal! The cats continue to release their winter coat at a freakishly rapid rate. The toilet upstairs won't flush worth a damn. My wife's air conditioning conditions the air beautifully but fails to actually cool down her trusty Volvo. The openings in my coaching calendar were weirdly still there when I woke up this morning. And, much to my surprise... when I checked just now, the balances of our checking accounts are completely unmoved by Care2.com's and their 15.7+ million registered users' exposure to me.

Weirdly phenomenal is perhaps just the fact that all of this is my life... and I love it completely.