Today is my birthday. Almost.
I explain it all here :
Still trying to work up the ambition to try my news thing, Bullshit and Lies.
Some day soon, I hope. Could be big.
So yeah, tomorrow is my 52nd birthday. Whoop de frigging do. I always want to get excited about it and make a big deal of it but I never do.
If I had my way, I’d have a big birthday party with lots of people I know and love and we’d hang out and chat and have snack and there’d be cake and entertainment – basically the whole traditional deal but, ya know, for grownups.
So, no silly hats. Or clowns – definitely no goddamn clowns. And the cake would be sugar free, which probably means I’d have baked it myself.
It’ll taste good but it probably won’t be pretty unless someone else iced it.
As for the entertainment, it would probably be just some dude with a guitar who can sing. A full band would be cool but probably way too loud and not only do I, in general, not like loud things, to me the most important part of this party would be the conversation, so music at a quiet, background level only.
Although I suppose, if the band really put on a good show, I would permit the conversation to stop while we all watched them do their thing.
But then back to the talking! Hey, it’s my party, and I love conversation.
Hmm. Maybe it could be a 70’s type party, complete with conversation pits, fondue, pitchers of cocktails, and rampant bisexuality.
Well it’s hard to throw a good orgy with it.
Do people still throw cocktail parties? They were everywhere when I was a kid. It was fashionable to roll your eyes at them and talk about how dreadful they were, especially when you were at one for some reason, but as a kid they always seemed awesome.
People hanging around being sophisticated and trying to sound like intellectuals while sipping tasty cocktails and hooking up with one another.
Sounds like a lot of fun to me, especially if you have some people truly worth talking to in the mix so things don’t become too vapid.
Turning 52 is no big deal. Turning fifty was, of course, a very big deal, and not one I’d care to repeat, to be honest. And turning 51 was a bit of a deal because it really swept away the last dregs of any denial I still felt about being in my fifties.
And speaking of which, I feel like your fifties are an odd time. You’re definitely not middle aged any more (odds are, you ain’t making it to 100) so you are definitely not young and yet you’re not really old yet either.
Not in the senior citizen sense of the word.
It’s like your fifties are a DMZ between young and old. As if you’re practicing for really being old. More or less just getting used to the idea.
It’s the age where you start thinking of yourself as old and kind of trying out the idea in conversation like a teenager learning to swear.
And you start ending sentences with, “:..because I’m old. ”
Maybe that’s a Gen X thing. I dunno. Maybe we feel the need to recontextualize ourselves in order to be properly understood.
I certainly feel old. But that might have more to do with having an unhealthily sedentary lifestyle with very little movement.
My diet is healthy but my lifestyle ain’t.
I’ve finally started doing the exercises my physiotherapist gave me last Monday, otherwise known as almost a week ago.
Well, I did most of them. Rather depressingly, I was too tired by the other exercises to do the “draw letters of the alphabet in the air with your foot” one.
Presumably that’s to strengthen the muscles the other exercises don’t reach, as well as to reinforce precision of movement.
I predict my finding it very annoying.
More after the break.
High on life
And by life, I mean sugar.
Been to Denny’s, had a nice meal, including a lovely gooey chocolate dessert, and got my gift from Joe and Julian, which is a lovely fat little Thermos brand thermos, and of course I got my best gift, which was a lovely conversation.
So if I had to sum up this outing in a word, that word would be : potrezebie.
But a close second would be : lovely.
Unfortunately, Felicity couldn’t make it to my little birthday bash because her gout flared up and the poor dear could barely walk let alone get to Denny’s and back.
So grr at Felicity’s gout. You were missed, dear. It was not the same without you.
After Denny’s, we picked her up some stuff from McD’s, and picked up my gift from her, which is a Brita water bottle with the Brita filter built in so I can have lovely clean Brita water whenever I like.
I plan to make it my new drinking vessel. Not only should this make meeting my hydration needs tastier, I honestly think Brita water does a better job of washing the impurities out of my body than regular tap water.
Possibly because it takes the impurities out of the tap water, thus keeping it from adding to the problem. Or maybe it’s just the placebo effect, I dunno.
I think it was rather clever of the Brita people to think of this product as there’s millions of young people carrying their metal water bottles around with them everywhere these days, so why not one-up the other water bottles by making one with your very well known water filter built in?
It certainly made me want one!
I’m a little worried that I have not received a letter from my mother yet. Usually I would get one well before my birthday but nope, nothing yet.
I’m not worried about whatever card she got me or what money she put in it.
I just want to know that she’s OK.
Maybe I should email my brother.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.