On The Occasion Of My 29th Birthday

[This essay began life as a speech that I had planned on giving at
my joint "Prime Pair" birthday with Alex West in 2001 (he was turning
31, hence the lame math-geeky joke).  I didn't finish it before--or at--
the party, so I decided instead to inflict it, once completed, on a somewhat 
wider audience, but the format remains the same.  If you weren't actually
there, well, just pretend you were.  :)  Perhaps you should imagine Alex
standing off to one side and providing an impromptu simultaneous 
translation into sign language (a "service" that I rendered him on the
analogous occasion in 2000).]

Thank you all for coming to this celebration of the sense of humor that 
Alex and I share.  It's awfully hard to get this many of my friends to
show up to a single gathering, so I've taken to desperate measures:
getting married, leaving the state...I just hope that I can keep 
coming up with plausible-seeming excuses like this, but I think I'm 
running out of the easy ones.

This past year--my second year of being perfect, mathematically 
speaking (indeed, I'm told that I was a perfect little snot when I
was 6)--I have been going through a series of what are euphemistically
known by those are not, themselves, currently experiencing them as
"major life changes", and as something less printable by those that are.

If it weren't for the fact that our decision to marry surprised virtually 
no one, I'd have to rank my marriage to Megan at the top of the list.
However, in many ways our wedding was a public acknowledgement of an
already-existing bond.  To tell the truth, I'd be hard-pressed to say 
exactly when we knew that we were going to marry each other (although
I think that we can bound it from above by the date of our engagement),
but it's certainly been a while.  Nevertheless, the wedding itself, and
the planning for it, have been a huge factor in my life for the past year:
it was the single biggest, most complicated, and most nerve-wracking event
for which I ever expect to be responsible (either solely or jointly): no
cotillion for my kids.  :)

A direct result of my marriage to Megan is that we decided to change our
last name.  This decision, in itself, was easy enough, but figuring out
what to change it *to*--and then coming to terms with that decision--
took an extraordinarily long time (just ask Megan, who had it sorted out
months before I did).  As a result, I am changing my last name to the
ancestral form of my father's family name--O'Madadhain--which has the
nice property that no one outside Ireland will be able to correctly 
pronounce it given the spelling, or spell it if they've only heard it; this
should cut down on the number of my students who successfully manage to
lay a curse on me.  ;>  (Incidentally, when I actually go through the 
legal process, I will almost certainly also be changing my middle name 
as well; I haven't yet figured out to what I will be changing it, but 
"Christian" has never fit me well.)

Both of these changes entail some contemplation of my identity: it is
strange to think of myself as a "husband", or as having a "wife" (I 
actually think that it might be easier to think of myself as a "father",
although as far as I know I have no reason to believe that I would
be correct in doing so), and trying to adjust to having a new name 
just makes it that much weirder.

On a somewhat more somber note, I found out a few weeks ago that the cat
whom it has been my pleasure to serve these past 15 years, Frodo, is
undergoing progressive kidney failure (most likely lymphoma of the kidney), 
and will probably not live out the year (chemotherapy might give him a
few extra months, but would run about $150 a week).  As far as I can tell, 
he's not really in any pain, but he has definitely lost weight and is 
becoming less mobile.  

It's hard for me to imagine life without Frodo; I've known him longer than
anyone I can think of, other than my family, and I've lived with him almost
continuously for that entire period.  This will not be the first cat to
whom I have been attached that I will have lost--Pippin claimed that 
distinction about 16 years ago--but it doesn't get any easier.  I know that
15 years is a pretty decent life span for a cat, but it's hard to accept
that he will almost certainly die soon, regardless.  I'm glad, however,
that I have been given warning of this so that I can make sure that I 
consciously appreciate the time that he has left.


All of this, now, comes in the context of my departure for Irvine and
disgustingly sunny Southern California.  :)  There are a number of reasons 
for this (a long essay on this is available elsewhere) which basically boil 
down to the fact that the U of Oregon turned out to be a bad place for me 
to do the Ph.D. research that I want to do.  Unfortunately, Irvine is 
far enough away from everyone that I know well that I can get to the 
closest of you only in a day of driving the car I don't have--and most of
you live much farther away than that.

I know that lack of "narrative closure"--a completion to our personal
story, or at least a nice chapter break--is a part of life.  If you read
as many books as I do, you may--as I have from time to time--occasionally 
think "well, once X gets sorted out, then I can Get On With My Life".
The thing is, life will continue merrily {marching, staggering, bouncing,
careening, ...} along regardless of whether X gets sorted out or not (or 
morphs into Y).

Nevertheless, I deeply regret that I won't have the opportunity to continue
to share my life as much as I have with many of those that have become 
very close to me.  Being estranged by the two hours' drive that separates
Eugene from Portland was bad enough (I had already mostly reconciled myself
to the separation from my friends and family who lived much farther away) 
but this additional distance makes a qualitative difference: I now can't 
make casual plans to visit any of you.  <rueful smile>

I will miss you all a great deal.  If any of you should choose to brave
the sunshine, beaches, and apparent complete lack of weather that beset me
here, I will try to make your ordeal worthwhile.  :)

Good luck to you all in all that you do.

Warmest regards,

Joshua O'Madadhain
16 September 2001