My darling Anne has wanted to throw me a birthday party of some kind for years, but given my discomfort with birthdays and with aging in general, I’ve never been enthusiastic about the idea. This year, however, was a different situation. A big landmark like 50 ought to be observed, right? And besides, like I said in the previous entry, the birthday thing has been growing unexpectedly easier the last couple years, so I told her okay, let’s do something.

The result was an open house, which isn’t quite the same thing as full-on party but still serves to get actual living, breathing people into the same space as you instead of them just leaving digital sentiments on Facebook. Anne did a fabulous job of arranging food, decorations and a venue, which coincidentally was in the same building where she and I attended elementary school, and where my grandmother attended high school before that. I quite liked that. It felt…. symmetrical. And it was fun to be in the old place again. I had a lot of flashbacks that night.

I also saw a lot of friends, some of whom I haven’t managed to get together with in a very long. My evil twin and fellow Blasphemous Bastard, Dr. Robert, even flew out from Pennsylvania to spend the weekend with me, a sincerely touching gesture for which I can’t thank him enough.

Although Anne handled all the real work of putting the thing together, I wanted to make a contribution as well, something that would put my personal stamp on the proceedings that our guests could point to and say to themselves, “Yep, that’s Jason all right.” So I curated a slideshow of photographs from throughout my life to run on some digital picture-frame displays, as well as a playlist of favorite music.

The photos were the easy part; it turns out that I have a lot of favorite music.

After a first pass through my iTunes library, I was shocked to see that the list I’d assembled would take approximately three days to get through. So I started trimming, trying to whittle the whole thing down to only the bare essentials. The second version was just under two days in length. At that point, I decided to screw it and just put the damn thing on shuffle play and call it good.

In the end, I needn’t have bothered. I don’t think anyone paid the slightest attention to the music. Which is fine. It was better that people enjoyed the company and the conversation. But you know… I did go to the effort of building the damn thing, and I think a real thematic tone emerges when you look at it: a bit wistful, definitely nostalgic, but also hopeful and even determined. I’d kind of like it to have some kind of life beyond the couple hours it played at the event. So, for the sake of posterity, I now present my 50th B-day playlist for any who might be interested. Just click the highlighted text. It’s in PDF format, and be warned that it’s very long… but maybe you can use it to build your own playlist of songs that remind you of me, or you can just shake your head at my appalling lack of taste or something… but at least it’s out there in the world now…