Ignition

  Forty-Two I wrote a version of this a few months ago, and I am still not sure about how much of it is true. Supposedly, Douglas Adams was a techie and a maven of ASCII coding. When he wrote, in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, that Deep Thought’s answer to the ultimate question about life, the universe, and everything was “42,” he might have been referencing its ASCII output: the asterisk. In computing, this can be a stand-in for user input. To wit, his message may have been that we, the users of our own experience, are really the ones who get to decide its meaning. As of February 22nd, 2025, I’m no longer forty-two years-old. Spoiler: I still haven’t really figured out what my life means to me. But it is of note that this hasn’t been any ordinary year; it has been one of the hardest I’ve ever had. I left my first career as an educator after nineteen years. Being a teacher is such a part of my identity that the change has left me with the kind of identity crisis I had asc...