upon closer inspection…
it’s been a week since my birthday, since i turned twenty two. it’s strange .. those words don’t mean anything to me. twenty two .. the idea that a number signifies, numerically, the amount of time i have spent as an oxygen-breathing life form… arbitrary.
rather, the only way i can calculate what it means for me to be twenty two is think about it as a representation of twenty two years of life-moments. and in the last few years, there have been some moments.
august 31,1998. bronxville, new york. i turned eighteen in my first week at sarah lawrence. beth was my only friend. my parents, still in town from the great move-in, took beth and i to dinner at pane e vino, in bronxville. i was dating alex. i wore a lot of neutral colors. my hair was long. i was naive and happy and excited.
august 31, 1999. tuckahoe, new york. we had just moved into ressmeyer, for our sophomore year. again, my parents took beth and i out to dinner, somewhere in tuckahoe this time. my hair was long. i was nineteen, my break-up with alex only weeks away. my spirits were high. the summer had been spent in austin, working with ken (good) and slowly losing alex (also good, in retrospect). it had been my first time in my own apartment, my first time learning my way around political journalism, my first time learning my limitations in love. it had been a productive summer.
august 31, 2000. houston, texas. my then-friend amy flew down from boston to celebrate with me. beth, boarding a bus from her crazed life in dallas, came to houston for me. my hair was short. i was turning twenty, no longer a teen. i was a little less than happy, but i didn’t know it at the time. the shit with kate had come and gone, the hellish christmas with family in egypt had somewhat healed, and the summer had been spent all over the place, never able to find peace. but that night, i went out to brasil’s with erin + nathan, amy + james, and brian. it was nice.
august 31, 2001. providence, rhode island. days before the world changed. my twenty first birthday was sort of a calm between two storms – when you can still feel the ripple of the old danger and can’t yet sense what’s looming large in the future. my junior year could only be called chaotic, depressing, a low point in my life. the summer had been spent recovering – from bad choices, bad frames of mind, and bad friends. it was the summer i realized how important it is to be your own watchdog, to guard over your happiness as if your life depended on it. that summer in texas, i had my parents, i had erin and raychul, i had love and a sense of peace. and even though the clouds were most certainly still on the horizon that day, only a short week before the most painful week of my life, i was okay. not happy, but managing.
august 31, 2002. dallas/austin, texas. my senior year is over. there’s no more school-starting associated with my birthday now. but how much has changed in one short year. i barely recognize myself. i have lost some friends in this year, but they were friendships that had soured. i have shed some bad habits, some demons of self-doubt, some penchants for melodrama. i have solidified friendships. i have shouldered some responsibilities, some better than others. i have cried a lot this year, and i have fallen hard this year. but i’ve gotten back up, and i’ve taken loss in stride. which means that of the four years mentioned here, this has been the healthiest. the happiest. funny, how that worked out.
and not to forget, september is a busy birthday month in my wide circle, past and present. but since i have the memory of an elephant, i can’t forget these people, even if they’ve long gone from my life. so, in the correct order, the september birthdays: conrad lumm, may lightfoot, kate berenson, karim “turkey” von alvensleben, siegfried modola, matthieu brajot, and even alex herrin.
phew!
two things:
1 happiest twenty-third birthday, conrad.
2 but perhaps more importantly: penguin prostitutes! hahahahahhaha.
she’s baack.
you know those vacations that rock, but towards the end, you start looking forward to being at home again?
this wasn’t one of those.
*sigh*
i miss texas already. so instead of waxing poetic on turning twenty two [more on that later], i present instead: a list on why this weekend rocked the casbah -
*luiz. *erin. *raychul. *matt. *raychul’s matt. *meeting ross, amy, and mark, to name a few. *erin again. *raychul again. *seeing raychul and matt in love, and getting to discuss a Certain Impending Ceremony. *driving to austin from dallas on a sunny, big-sky texas saturday. *developing a car-stalker because some chubby guy in a honda looked enough like william blacklock for us to stare at him, thus inciting him to drive seductively around us the whole way to austin. *having stalker-boy stop at the same texaco as us. *magnolia’s queso, stoned. *pink lace underwear and other mutant super powers. *frito pie at ez’s. *everyone else buying me cosmos on my birthday. *feeling tragically hip at red fez. *deciding to get an owl tattoo. *having matt spend three hours drawing said owl tattoo. *deciding on the way to the tattoo parlor to get a completely different tattoo. *it says heart, in tiny brown letters, right on my tailbone. *yes, i’m aware that my heart isn’t located there. *having the mind and the soul hold my hands and tell me funny stories while the tattoo guy (who looked like a fat[ter] talkative silent bob) stared at my buttcrack. *how many licks would it take to get to the center of my tootsie roll? *mexican food and margaritas. *the sunroof in the jetta. *singing weezer at the top of our lungs. *sunday night: two apartments, four couples, krissa being the only one not getting any. well, the world’s gotta change someday. *toto. *reliving Watermelongate. *the trinity friendship soaring to all new heights [lows?] in the bathroom together. *finally completing the circle.
but most of all, the best thing about this weekend ….
*remembering why erin, raychul and i are still part of the trinity. i love you, soul and mind. ya’ll, in a word, rock.
