29. As of today I am just one year away from being 30. Incidentally this time of life is what inspired one of my favorite album of all time: No Doubt’s Return of Saturn. On that album (which was the follow-up to their huge hit Tragic Kingdom — yes, that’s a pun about Disneyland) Gwen Stefani sings about growing older, questioning her life, and looking forward to a time when she’ll have everything figured out.
When it first came out I enjoyed the record but it’s only become relevant to me in the past few years of my life and I started to truly understand the themes Stefani was singing about. Being the pop culture junkie that I am, I also found it fascinating that she would make such an honest record while playing in a band with her ex-boyfriend and having started a relationship with Gavin Rossdale relatively recently. For example, could you imagine saying to you boyfriend, “I always thought I’d be a mom. Sometimes I wish for a mistake” like Stefani essentially does on “Simple Kind of Life”?
As of only a couple of years ago, I assumed that my life would grow to mirror the album more as I saw no “happily ever after” in sight. But there was one hope for me — the real life of Gwen Stefani who married Rossdale in 2002 and has remained married while working in a business where that sort of thing doesn’t usually happen.
Sparing you the whole story, today I am in a similar position to Stefani (minus the rock star status and millions of dollars) as I have a wife who I am amazingly happy with and who helps my navigate through life with an ease I never knew was possible.
Tomorrow my wife and I are heading out on a new adventure together as we move from lovely Los Angeles to Springfield, Missouri. The first question our friends asked upon hearing about this was, “but how will you survive there without Disney?” A fair question, but the impetus for the move was to actually get to experience more Disney and the world.
As you may expect, Los Angeles isn’t the cheapest place to live. My wife and I do okay here, but there’s not much left in the budget for the foreign trips we’d like to take together before we, one distant day, have (gulp) children. So while I won’t be a 45 minute (assuming there’s no traffic — a naive assumption, indeed) drive from a Disney park, the hope is that soon I will be able to visit both domestic Disney resorts on a somewhat-regular basis as well as pay my first visits to the Paris, Hong Kong, and eventually Shanghai parks. I also wouldn’t mind visiting Tokyo again…. and again… and again.
The other benefit is that I’ll have a new perspective on the happens and goings on at the parks thanks to my having some literal and figurative distance from them. So rest assured there will be plenty more entries into The E-Ticket Life.