l'anniversaire pt. 1: depression

Like most people that aren't angling for a dictatorship or corner office (or both, as I suppose the former would provide the latter), my first reaction to learning a person's age is to compare my position in life to theirs. Thus, when I discover that White Teeth was published when Zadie Smith when she was 25, brief existential panic ensues, but when I find out that Ira Glass was born in 1959 I calm back down. I sometimes think that I chose my profession because early fame is nearly nonexistent; architects are like novelists, "young" until 40. Actually, I prefer to think of architects as more like ninjas-- plenty of young hotshots, but nobody can beat the sensei (at least not without a long backstory and a longer showdown). And, many of us are bald, and we wear lots of black.