It's been a long week of socializing. Highlights:

• I got to understand my spiky, resentful mood a bit better. Possible culprit (unconfirmed): sour cream.

• My team got our own t-shirts.

• Work launched our latest product. We had a nice launch party in Palo Alto, where I hung out with Kelly and our new intern for a while, who turns out to be a pretty cool guy.

• Work gave us the best swag I've ever gotten from any job, to celebrate the launch. I didn't have to do much for the launch, but I do lots of other important things, so I don't feel bad.

• I had a lovely evening with the nice girl again. I should do that more often.

• I stopped at the Apple Store and drooled on the MacBook Pro for about a half hour (well, and occasionally admired the freckled hottie working at the Studio counter who had no interest in me at all). Tonight I finally ordered one! I'm excited. My last not-used computer was in 1998. Now I'm all grown up and I can just put it on my credit card and pay it off. And stuff will work! I can watch videos and listen to RealPlayer crap again and everything. And I will start recording music. I saved maybe $600 by ordering through a friend's educational discount; naturally, that money goes toward various audio toys. And possibly a table to put everything on.

• I saw The Closet, a hilarious and wonderful French film that you should see too.
• I signed up for a safety course to learn how to ride a motorcycle. Yes, if I like it I will probably buy one. Yes, I will spend more money on safety gear than on the motorcycle.

• I went to the dojo this morning. Various joints and muscles were out of sorts, but I had a great time anyway. It's good to remind myself that aikido is fun.

An iced mocha earlier today--I'm still learning not to risk these things--put me in this mood, so I was doing that whole reflective thing again, especially with my parents' multi-decade wedding anniversary coming up: when they were my age, they'd been married ten years. It's not like my life could have been radically different, given who I am: I could have gotten married as I thought in 2000, and I would have been miserable for longer, and divorced by now. I don't regret any of my choices, because at each step, I just do the best I can with who I am and what's available. I sometimes envy people whose lives have gone differently; it seems like if you're married (and especially with children), adventure will hunt you down and club you over the head, while I tend to have to go out looking for it. Except I know, from the number of bored and unhappy married people I've known, that it's not even remotely that simple. I think the adventure comes from staying engaged and involved in your world and the people in it.

Here's something bizarre to think about. In a lot of ways parenthood is just another challenge for people, and parents come to that challenge with the resources they have as people. They do the best they can with who they are, what they believe, what they want and what they're capable of. They fail, they stumble, they succeed. They have stuff they like doing besides being parents; sometimes their other dreams get put on hold while raising kids, and different people have different emotional reactions to that (acceptance, resentment, sadness). Right?

It seems so odd to me, and somehow so magical, that so much of my experience of life has been shaped just by how my parents have gone through their lives, and managed all their challenges of work and parenting and marriage and just being human. And they were shaped by the same things in their parents. Neat, no?