I came home tonight to 236 unread email messages which would be kind of overwhelming if I weren’t so used to being important. “Holy crap, I haven’t dealt with this many unread messages since I came back from the war and also since that time I had surgery,” I fibbed to myself, having neither been in a war nor had surgery. I mean, occasionally I’ve engaged in mindgames so ferocious they almost qualify as a war, but that didn’t affect my inbox. And I had oral surgery to bring down an impacted cuspid but that was before the invention of email. Oh dammit there I go again with the lying. I don’t know if I’m coming or going sometimes.
So yeah, loads of email and also, I’m officially old as of tonight. You wouldn’t know it to see me though since I exude such a fuckload of joie de vivre. In fact I’m giving off so much joie de vivre that the nation of France formally wrote to me and asked that I go easy on the joie because I’m overdoing it. What nerve, right? I mean, one man’s overdoing it is another man’s doing it just right. But whatever, I know it’s hard to keep up with me and my vibrating chakras.
Last night I went to Detroit (the club, not the Motor City) with a couple friends who I’ll call Phil and Collins, for reasons I haven’t quite figured out, and at the stroke of midnight which was my birthday they put stickers on me and then we played the world’s longest game of pool because we all suck. I imagine Phil would disagree since he beat Collins and me but only but a pair of balls. Collins and Phil also wore stickers because if I was going to walk around like an idiot covered in stickers I wasn’t going to be the only one. I saw Collins tonight and he still had stickers on the back of his jacket and this morning I woke up to find a sticker on my sock. By the way, they weren’t even birthday stickers. They were Batman stickers I think. “I’m so glad you went along with that,” said one of them, I think Collins, because they’re always surprised when I decide to have fun instead of sitting on the sidelines quietly judging everyone. Not really, however they have taken to calling me a “show pony” based on the considerable hair and makeup time I require and so they’re always surprised when I agree to sleep under keyboards and walk around wearing stickers. One of them made me run in the street just to see if I could do it since he claimed he couldn’t imagine me running. “I run like this!” I yelled, swishing my hands back and forth and doing a weird sort of skipping/shuffling/jumping kind of thing. It’s not really how I run, but then, how a woman runs is a very personal king of thing. Sometimes it’s like they don’t know me at all. They’ve also taken to letting me know how horrible my driving is, which is kind of true, except I let them know that the constant hectoring was in fact making my driving worse, a point made all the more poignant when I literally almost got in an accident because I was thinking about my hair. I only wish I were joking.
So then tonight for my actual bday a group of us went to a seafood restaurant and the crazy thing is that some of these friends went to dinner for my bday ten years ago, that’s how goddamn old I am. My friend Bret and I reminisced about how we were going to form an X cover band for an afternoon and then there was other reminiscing and then I forget what happened but I know at some point I began yawning because that’s how filled with joie de vivre I am. Then we went to Detroit, not because we really wanted to but because we couldn’t figure out where else to go. Oh wait, before that went spent a long time outside debating whether to go skinny dipping. I explained that it’s so like me to do that and that seldom is there a party where I’m not whipping my clothes off and jumping into a body of water. Sometimes even a bathtub or puddle! Also, I’m not sure why I’m concealing the identities of Phil and Collins, probably since I’m bored, but for the extremely careful reader and even the haphazard reader, Collins has appeared in this blog previously in various incarnations including as Toilet Duck.
Where was I? Oh yes, I was old. So then I decided to leave and I didn’t even give into sentimentality too much. Am I crying right now? I’m not actually. Not at all. Tomorrow I fly back to NY, back to all my NY friends whom I’m excited to see. Hopefully we can go skinny dipping.
Oh, and I’d like to give a big fat sticker-covered shout out to all of you who are awesome and who make me smile and whose comments I adore and who are the most loyal internet bunions a gal could have. I know I may not give the individual shout outs as often as Anna but I talk about you guys all the time, as do my parents. So thank you for reading!