29 candles

Yes, it's true, I just celebrated my 29th birthday. Does that make me old? Sometimes, such as mornings like today, I feel really old. Other times, I feel no older than ever. I guess that aging isn't so much an event as it is an aggregate collection of minor changes. I'm a different person than I was five years ago, but I don't feel any *older* than I was five years ago. Just a little smarter. Calmer. More focused, even if my focus happens to be on acting like a flaming idiot. Things like that.

Cinderella has left the building

This Saturday I went to a Mardi Gras party with my sister and my housemate, Chris. I wore my all-purpose gold medieval-type dress with various freaky Mardi Gras accessories (sorry, I didn't get a picture because I couldn't find the charger for my digital camera. God my sister was cross. She knows Anouk Pascale and she's a great photographer, so my sister wanted to show her photos). It was a great party, but we decided to leave because my sister was a little bored. We went to an Irish pub, had a watered down drink and listened to an absolutely horrid rendering of a Cure song by the bar band, then moved uptown to a bar where my sister knows a bartender. It was quite an interesting pub where they attempted to make it as authentic and old-fashioned as possible. The seats were simple brown wooden stools, the beer was served cold and there was only two toilets to cater to all guests. But the best thing was that they had a windmill to generate alternative energy to keep the beer cool. You could do a tour for a few dollars and see how it worked.

We sat and drank until closing (well, I drank soda because I'm the eternal designated driver), talking about fun things and not-so-fun things. It was a riot. We walked back down to the car and started home.

Now, I just have to tell this story because if I was to make a movie of my life, I would definitely put this scene in it. On the way home, my sister needed to empty the contents of her stomach onto the side of the road just as "O Fortuna" of Carmina Burana was playing. So I pulled over and while we sat in the car listening to her retch over the strains of the absolutely *evil* sounding chorus...well, it was just a moment to die for. Things like this just don't seem to happen frequently enough.

So Chris and I took her home, then went home and stayed up until 6:00 a.m. talking.

It was divine.

Will the mailman actually deliver THAT?

My friend Nik Seizure in California has been sending me some really interesting mail art lately, so I decided to get in on the act. I spent most of my sick day last Tuesday creating some collage art to mail him, but decided, after gluing glitter to Marilyn Monroe's curvy butt, that the post office machinery would destroy it. So I stuck it in an envelope and glued more stuff to *that*. It's addictive. Once you start gluing stuff together, you want to keep adding and adding and adding to it.

So I'm hoping to get some images of the mail art I create on my website soon.

Saturn spinning

"Now melts
and disappears
ice, snow and the rest,
winter flees,
and now spring sucks at summer's breast:
a wretched soul is he
who does not live
or lust
under summer's rule. Ah!

"Behold, the pleasant spring" - Carmina Burana

My Saturn return is next month. Astrologically, it means that I'm supposed to be coming to a point in my life where I establish who I will be as an adult. The Saturn return is supposedly characterized by major life decisions and rearrangement, which can cause it to be a chaotic time. From my perspective, all it means is that I'm remembering who it is I AM minus all of the things that I've been doing to keep me busy for the last couple of years. I'm not my career, I'm not my education. I'm not my spirituality. I'm not my sexuality. I'm not my family.

Who I am is who I am today. I am what I carve out for myself each day, I'm defining and redefining myself at each moment. I am the five senses that appreciate beauty, I am the poignant realization of sweet nothings, I am flashfire anger and sorrow for haste. I am the love that I feel for my friends. I am churning intellect, I am caution, I am a jubilant lack of inhibition.

I am me.

And I'm back.