[many happy returns]

I am 27 years old today.

It feels odd. I'm excited and terrified of this whole "growing up" concept. I mean...what does "growing up" really mean, anyway? Do people ever actually do that? I'm not sure. I've been reading the short stories of Simon Van Booy (please read his work...seriously), and I find myself completely entranced by his ability to write things that I have always thought, yet have never been able to express so eloquently.

Example:

Night can unmoor so many feelings; it is a relief we sleep through it. Night unravels the day and reinvents it for the first time. We may mean nothing to time, but to each other we are kings and queens, and the world is a wild benevolent garden filled with chance meetings and unexplained departures.

- The Secret Lives of People in Love, "Everything is a Beautiful Trick"

I wonder if things can happen too early or too late or if everything happens at exactly the right time. If so, how sad and beautiful.

- The Secret Lives..., "The Still But Falling World"

…realized…that anyone could love anyone under certain circumstances, and that life is a museum of small accidents.

- The Secret Lives..., "The Mute Ventriloquist"

Language is like looking at a map of somewhere. Love is living there and surviving on the land...there is no such thing as fate, but there are no accidents either. Love is like life but starts before and continues after - we arrive and depart in the middle.

- Love Begins in Winter, "Love Begins in Winter

We are not at home in the world because we imagine it is as we have become, full of nothing but yearning and forgetting and hoping for something so raw we can't describe it. We think of the world as the place of beginnings and ends, and we forget the in-between, and even how to inhabit our own bodies. And then in adulthood, we sit and wonder why we feel so lost.

- Love Begins in Winter, "Tiger, Tiger"

There's so much more I wish I could share, but please just read these short stories (and his novel, Everything Beautiful Began After) and underline the crap out of them as I did, if you wish (college taught me the beautiful concept of writing in books).

Anyway. Although it is supposed to rain later, at the moment it is 70 degrees and sunny and I am writing from my room where my windows are wide open, letting in fresh breeze that I can always feel from the lovely second story of this pretty little brownstone. I am not celebrating too much because of the approaching opening night of She Loves Me (get tickets, east coasters! http://www.interactproductions.org/), but plenty of people are making me feel special and loved today and I appreciate it more than I can say. I got the BEST package from my wonderful family, which included: homemade granola, nutella, cookies & chocolates, swedish fish & sour patch fruits, TINY post it notes (so tiny!!), sassy napkins (wine! how classy people get shitfaced), peanut butter, jelly, applesauce, tuna, and a beautiful card...I mean it's everything I need, really :o) I kind of burst into tears upon opening this package and discovering all of these treats...I blame it on my current over-emotional state, haha (but when am I not over-emotional...ahhh).

Anyway, my birthday. Wow. Birthdays are strange as one gets older. Strange in a pleasant way, yes, but I am also nostalgic (surprise, surprise) for the feeling of younger birthdays. There is an indescribable excitement that has somehow gotten lost as I've gotten older. It creeps up a little, but it's not the same.

I'm happy to be here, happy to be alive, happy to be 27. Let us see what this year brings.

[amanda]