Night of the Living Metaphor

Ask anyone who's known me for any amount of time and they will attest that I get weird around my birthday. It started when I was thirteen throwing a tantrum in the TJ Maxx parking lot and I've only become moodier since. I turn twenty-nine in a few days and I recently sent an e-mail to friends and acquaintances. As I begin my thirtieth year on earth, I wanted to know what if any regrets or advice my friends had. Some responses were unhelpful, "You are a complete idiot!!!" wrote a college friend. Some were thoughtful, "I think you should fuck," said my oldest friend. And some were hilarious, "Start an urban commune and document everything." I'm at that age where my friends are married, divorced or thinking about one or the other.

I met a college friend for dinner on Saturday night. She's recently engaged to a man she met online and I'll admit I'd been dreading this dinner since it was suggested. I talked my sister into happy hour beforehand feeling confident that this would be a dinner necessetating drunkeness. I wasn't wrong. The fiance had finished dinner by the time we arrived (just five mintues late) and grunted two or three words the entire time. The only complete sentence he managed to put forth was to dog my neighborhood. And then to tell me that his college was really difficult to get into; bully for you, jackass. After dinner, I headed to another bar and ran into someone with whom I'd gone to high school. This is what happens, when you live less than twenty miles from where you were raised. We talked about things and laughed about the grudges people carry with them and then I moved on. We met up with another friend and I ran into a guy I'd had a brief sexual relationship with and continue to have lingering weirdness and then my past walked from one end of the bar to the other. My junior high crush. The first boy to give me butterflies and the only boy to make me hyperventilate through the simple act of saying hello. He'd aged certainly, but it was him. This time there were no butterflies, there was no hyperventiltion. Just laughter (on my end) and on his a man in his early thirds with an abnormally large head and an extremely round face set on a very short neck. I'm guessing he's now a drug rep, maybe an accountant and most certainly a golfer. I'm going to also go out on a limb and say that he's dated a number of women longing to bake cupcakes for the PTA bake sale and maybe even wear pearls. Don't get me wrong, I frost a mean cupcake and I can rock the twin set if I have to, but pearls just aren't my thing.

I started writing this a few days before my birthday. And while it came and went without too much fanfare, I had one of my best yet. I took the day off work had lunch with a newer friend and dinner with one of my oldest. In between, I got to see the circus train, walk around downtown in the middle of the day, sit on my porch and read and just enjoy the simple act of living. It was one of the best days I've had in a long time and the fact that it was my birthday was just icing. I didn't blow out any candles this year and I didn't make any wishes. I don't think there's any secret to life except to keep living it.