So yesterday was my birthday, and yesterday started the war. Hmm.
I spent a lot of yesterday loving my friends. I got some great presents…not one, but two fancy spatulas, and you know there’s no birthday like a two-spatula birthday…and had a great dinner with lots of people I like. I ate what may be un-ironically described as a transcendent meatloaf as well as a purely decadent cake from my sweetheart. I was in the enjoyable position of sitting at a table with too many interesting conversations, so that I was constantly going “Wait, what? What was so funny? Tell the story again!” I am so blessed in the people I love and the ones that love me. I’m whiny a lot of the time, I admit, but I’m honest when I say that I couldn’t live without my people, and that last night brought that home to me several times a minute. It was a good party.
I also spent a lot of time being sad and angry and scared yesterday. A lot of obsessive news-reading. A lot of having twitchy conversations with similarly sad and angry and scared co-workers. A little wondering if it was okay for me to go to Old Navy on my lunch hour and get myself a shirt to wear to my dinner because I didn’t like the shirt I was wearing. A lot of thinking about all the arguments for and against war, and my own part in them, and my own part of the war itself. Coincidentally, I also thought about it being about time to get my taxes done. I thought about being an ugly American, and I thought about my sister’s going to Greece this summer and wondered if it would be all right. I thought about being in Baghdad right now. I thought about being in Washington, in New York. I think we’re all pretty scared.
So that’s that for that. It feels too weird to regale you with Tales Of Birthdays Past when they’ve just started a war and all, although please remind me to tell you, one day, about the birthday that was the one and only time my former “band,” PolkaHontas, ever played, and also about when I turned ten and all my friends got together and pretended to get me fake gifts, like an eraser, a gummy worm, a bag of rubber bands, and I had to be polite and say “Oh, thanks! I’ve been needing some garbage twist ties!” and meanwhile in my head I was all “Oh, COME on! I’m turning ten! Come on, people, ante up!” and obviously not much has changed in the subsequent eighteen years, and then finally, when it was time for the slumber party part of my party, one of the moms brought a bag full of my real presents and I was up to my elbows in goomie bracelets and Barbies, like the ungrateful spoiled brat I am. Everything else is pretty good with me. I’m going to a wedding this weekend in the San Juans. My poster is coming along much better than anticipated,although I’m not quite done yet. One of my bosses told me not to worry about it too much and just to make sure to put some pretty graphs on it, because “Psychologists love graphs.” Today is my first Thursday in over a year that I don’t have to go to clinic. The sun rises earlier every day, and there are daffodils everywhere, popping up wild in my yard. I made sure to put my birthday flowers out of Siegfried The Cat’s reach, by the by, so don’t y’all worry.
I’m ready to be twenty-eight, I think. I just hope the war is over by the time I’m twenty-nine.