birthday recap

Thank you everyone for the birthday wishes. I don't know, going into this post, if this will be the long or short version. I'm pretty hung over, and don't feel refreshed enough to be poetic, but I want to be.

We cleaned the house for seven hours. The bedroom is still a war zone, but that will have to get dealt with this week since we're getting a new bed this weekend. But the rest of the house looks amazing. For years, various people in my life have, rather boringly, postulated that my unwillingness to be a neatnik stems from some sort of fear of allowing other people into my life. I scoffed at them. Being lazy, inept at cleaning and overworked and crazily ambitious always made cleaning low down on the list of tasks to do. It hasn't changed, and it's unlikely it ever will.

But there were moments yesterday while we were doing it, and during the party, as I looked around our home at all the pictures on the walls -- us, our friends, art, things made for us and bought by us and created by us, and I had a moment of "OH Christ, this is scary!" It was a good moment to have. I don't often have fear where other people do, at least on emotional matters, and I felt like even if it were just a flicker, it was something that provided me with some empathy and also some insight into the ways in which I have or am something valuable in the world.

So our apartment was filled with about 20 or so people, which for a party in NYC is pretty crowded and busy. People were loud. People flowed from room to room. People smoked on our fire escape and howled into the night (much to the displeasure of my downstairs neightbors). We drank copious amounts of wine, sake and vodka and, astoundingly, nearly all of a bottle of Nuvo despite the fact that we had not run out of other liquor. One friend drank wiskey out of a flask, and late in the evening when most peoplw had gone home there was a round of absinthe.

I get that people have enthusiasm for me, or parts of me or stuff that I do. and I get that people have affection for me as the wacky person who's around their lives that they don't quite know what to do with it. And I don't ever, ever, ever, want to put someone emotions into someone else's mouth or gestures, but I felt so fucking loved last night.

Daniel got everyone to sing happy birthday to me, and I almost cried. Every gift I was given was so deeply and sincerely connected to my enthusiasms and amusements and ambitious and foibles without judgement I could have just died. Someone from fencing made me this crazy ass "in case of emergency break for wand" thing and showed up with a woman who worked at our hotel in Sicily! I was given an aviator scarf. Someone else gave me West with the Night that I've actually never read, but remember my mother reading and teling me stories from when I was a very young child. Time and time again each gift was such a gesture, even as those gestures somehow ranged rfom a lovelly little icon to anubis to a kit of office supplies and, ultimately (and this may be the funniest thing anyone has ever bought me ever) Shark Attack 3: Megalodon.

Maybe I'm just having a Ricky Fitts moment, but it was all really fucking special.

Over the next 24 hours I must do thank you notes, as well as email the various people who accidentally left things at our place (that's you rusty_halo and sykii.

My life is strange, my heart is difficult, and my ambition is often thawrted (it's designed that way by virtue of scale). But it feels like a good life. And a grand one. And both those things matter to me, and perhaps matter in teh abstract, a lot.

When we were going to bed, tired enough to be miserable, I asked Patty if she'd had a good time. It's hard, I'd imagine, to be in room full of my loud friends and our long history (at one point soeone made a crack about how it was the usual suspects at the end of the night and Patty said "and me!" and I told her she was the usual suspects as this lot were her in-laws now -- she noted that her other in-laws (my parents) cook chicken for her, and asked if they'd made her chicken too -- I am, having just told her I dol this story here, apparently telling the story wrong and out of context, because it seems I can't actually recall said context. So be it). She said it was fun. And I said that we have a nice home now.

"I always have a home with baby," she said.

There is no amount of house cleaning or lack there of that could possible keep me safe from any of the people I adore. And I like it that way. But yeah. Our place looks rad, and the party rocked. And eventually, I might just stop being a big ol' sap about it.

36!