Okay! Birthday weekend! Go!
Friday I went to work wearing my knee high boots. We went to Red Robin for lunch and I convinced one of my bosses to go for a turkey burger, which he enjoyed very much. There were congratulations on the new job all around, which were very nice, and I spent quite a while reveling in the fact that I have sort of a grownup job now at the advanced age of twenty-nine. I hope itās not going to be too grownup though, but I wonāt really know that for a couple of weeks. I left early.
I stopped by the grocery store to get last minute food and also a backup birthday cake. This is very embarrassing, but I feel I must come clean: I told Carl, in no uncertain terms, that I absolutely did not want him to make me a birthday cake from scratch with his own two hands. He hadnāt ever made a cake before and I was not very supportive of his doing so for the first time when I was having people over and when I was already very nervous about all that. He was so excited to make me a cake and I pretty much shot him down and he went ahead and made it anyway. And I was still nervous and hence the backup cake. I am sort of a control freak sometimes, and never more so when itās a completely ridiculous issue that has no bearing on anything. Anyway, my fears were unfounded, as will become clear.
I was finishing up all my hors dāoeuvre prep when it became clear that I needed to pulverize some dried figs and that the immersion blender I borrowed from Deane was just not getting the job done. You know what Deane did? Deane ran upstairs and said, āI think thereās another way to do thisā and came down bearing A GIGANTIC FOOD PROCESSOR. That was my BIRTHDAY PRESENT. For reals, yāall. Can you believe it? I screamed and cried and couldnāt believe it, and we immediately threw the figs in there and they pulverized like a dream come true. Except that the main bowl thing leaked a little. Investigations are in process, donāt worry. This lovely gift also started the trend people giving me exclusively food-related gifts. Itās like they know me or something.
So, la la la, I went and got changed and then people started coming over and Deane put out the first pizza heād just whipped up (which made most of the other food obsolete, which perhaps was a good thing as Iām not sure that that white bean dip was a good move) and I made people put on fake tattoos, for which, as you may know, I have an unholy love, and then Mrs. Roboto showed up and I was all bragging on her, as in the following conversation with my friend Scott:
Scott Whoās the girl in the cherry skirt? Sheās hot.
Chiara I know. I know her from online. See, my online friends are hot chicks! I rule!
Scott Hey, I know plenty of hot chicks online too! For only $15.99 a month!
Darling ginger of MATH+1 managed to make it even though sheās going through a tough time right now, and she also brought me an extra microwave she had for use in my new office. I love a girl who brings a major appliance to a partyā¦and one which went so well with the āGive Chiara Foodā theme was so prevalent.
I was a little nervous about mixing friend worlds, definitely, and I did have occasional times of freaked-out āAhhhhh! Get these people out of here! I want to be in my pajamas!ā but I managed to hold it together. I ought to have gone outside and poured a little root beer on the ground for poor sick Sundry but I just thought of that right this minute so it doesnāt matter anymore. It was super nice to see a lot of my friends though; there were several people I hadnāt seen for like, a year or something, and that was cool too.
And the cake! The cake! The cake was so good! It had pineapple in it! Accompanied by perhaps the best Happy Birthday rendition I have ever heard (helps to have an opera singer in the crowd), it was glorious to behold and delicious to consume. I stand totally and completely repudiated in terms of cake, Carlās prowess in baking. Carl, you bake a mighty fine cake. There is no denying it. We didnāt even look at the backup cake. I donāt even know what happened to it. I do, however, know what happened to the gigantic tin of seven-layer bars that Katie gave me, but Iām not going to discuss that right now. Iām sort of sorry Katieās already married because I sort of want to marry her myself.
So, you know. I am not much for the crazy hilarity, party-wise, but I think it went off all right. Deaneās pizza was a big hit and I know I always enjoy seeing normally quiet, buttoned-down sorts of people wearing scorpion tattoos on their necks. It was a nice little get together and it made me even want to have another one in three or fours years or something.
Saturday was the weekendās first college fair and it wasā¦fine. A little boring. My friend Craig tagged along for reasons best known to himself and ended up, to the surprise of no one who knows him, as the total star of the afternoon, talking to all the kids who want to go to his college. He was very good. I was too, if I may pimp myself for a minute. There really is a certain art to giving the same information over and over to twitchy, high-achieving high school juniors (really) and I think I did pretty well. Not as good as Craig, of course, but whatever.
After a bit of drama involving my car (needs new tires! Oh no!) , Carl picked me up and we trundled down to lovely Portland, Oregon, a mere three hours south and a very nice weekend destination in its own right. I got to drive the five-speed Volvo for a little bit, which wasnāt too scary and only involved one episode of me screaming āWhat gear what gear what gear?ā We listened to the French CD a little, as promised, and that was pretty funny but a little hard to follow along without using the book. We listed to part of a very nice (non-food, but oh well) birthday present from Carl. For no reason we were tired when we got it so it was a room service and movie type of nightā¦of course, for me, this is living large because there are few things in life better than room service, I believe. Especially when itās Thai room service and you branch out from your never-fail pad see ewe and go for some delicious pineapple fried rice. High times, Iām telling you.
Yesterday we went to brunch where we tried valiantly to consume the enormous plates of oatmeal we were served. Nothing doing, because this oatmeal had some sort of magical property to just keep the bowl full no matter how much you ate. Normally this would not be a problem for me, but I was still sort of full of cake and seven-layer bars, so I had to give up and throw my spoon down in defeat. We strolled about lovely downtown Portland for a little while and loitered outside Powellsā Technical Books, which, like much else yesterday, was closed at ten in the morning. Finally it was time to do another college fair.
It was, like, really slow. My brochure things werenāt moving at all and I was sitting next to this guy who was very nice in a chatty sort of way but just kept talking and talking and talking about how his school does this and his school does that and his school has one of the best womensā wrestling teams (really!) in the nation and on and on and on and on. Heād be nattering at me and Iād be nodding and going āRilly? Huh. Yeah? For real? No! Huh! Hard to believe!ā and then someone would come up to my table with burning questions about my alma mater and heād just sort of keep talking and Iād have to say something like āExcuse me for a momentā and heād be quiet while I talked to the kid, and then Iād sit down and heād start right up with his story at the point heād been cut off, and this went on for three hours.
Now, if Iād started this journal in 1998, the above paragraph is what all my entries would have been like. Occasionally I would have spiced it up with news about how I had to read eighty-five million poorly spellchecked college admission essays and how I was, as a consequence, going blind. It was weird, like at certain times while I was handing out information and saying things like āCollege is fun! Youāll like it!ā Iād think about how I really was pretty good at this sort of thing, and I thought about what it would have been like to be at Pitzer for the last five years, doing that work. I sort of canāt imagine living in Southern California anymore; itās just really weird that I did it at all. So thereās that. And I donāt know how cool it is to be thinking and talking about your college days for the seven successive years after you graduate. I mean, I think about that time all the time anyway, so maybe it would be cool to still get paid for it, and I do have to admit that I liked the part where I got to judge people on a regular basisā¦but I donāt know. Weird.
So the fair finally ended and I packed up all my stuff and Carl and I went back to Powellsā and had ourselves a time wandering around and getting lost and sighing over all the books we wanted. We got several books each (thanks, no sales tax Oregon!) and talked about how we wanted to read every book in the world. Also about how we were so tired and didnāt feel like driving back to Seattle that evening. We considered, briefly, abandoning the car in the parking lot forever and just taking the train back home, but sadly, reason prevailed and we sucked it up and went on home.
Three hours is a perfect little road trip, I discovered. I read aloud from one of our new books until it got too dark to see, and then I sang him every Disney song I knew, and then we listened to some CDs, and talked about how the party had gone and about his going to DC again next week. We ate the rest of the seven-layer bars and praised their deliciousness once again. He said he didnāt mind driving all the way home, that I didnāt have to drive stick if I didnāt want to. We sat there quietly for a while, driving north, and I felt sort of sad and confused but also calm and dreamy and just like that, we were home again, and it was the end of my birthday week, and that was just fine. I was very glad to be twenty-nine right then, knowing what I know now.
