March 30, 2011
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Twenty-Two
I am 22 today.
My birthday usually falls in the middle of a horrific pile of deadlines, so don't often do much to celebrate. I don't have time and, at this point in the year, neither does anybody else. But this year there is just enough of a gap in my list of due-dates that I can take some time to enjoy the day. I don't know what I'll do--spend some time reading for fun, maybe--but I'll do something. At this point, any excuse to stop and breathe for a while is a welcome one.
I am looking forward to the summer. It isn't very far away at all now. I got a job as a waitress. I realize that isn't super thrilling, but I got a job as a waitress in a restaurant in a tiny tourist town very, very far south, near a national park and mountains and a lake and the American border. I am looking forward to being somewhere completely new. I am looking forward to living near water, to being able to climb mountains on my days off, to being able to go outside at night and be dwarfed by trees, by the sky.
And I want to write and take pictures and draw, to fill envelopes with letters and photographs and leaves from the trees I will sit under to read. I want to stand on a rocky ledge and scream.
22 is going to be interesting, I can promise you that.
h.
Comments (3)
Please do not climb anything without telling people where you are going and when you expect to be back.
But after that it sounds AWESOME.
Happy Birthday, h. I can't believe you are 22 and, interestingly, I find can hardly believe you weren't already!
x.g.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY. I like your plan for the day, I like your plan for the summer.
When I was about eight, someone told me a riddle (which absolutely doesn't work written down) about how there were twin sisters, and one of them was twenty, and the other one was twenty-two, but how could this eve be possible? I spent hours - I spent the whole afternoon of a school excursion round a viking settlement - thinking about this. I thought that maybe they weren't sisters, they were just two strangers who happened to be twins, separately, or that maybe it was something to do with giving birth on an aeroplane and time zones, or maybe even space travel was involved. And then the answer was just so obvious because, of course, it was just that the other sister was twenty, too.
But I've always thought of this and when I was 22 I liked to think of how, if I wanted, under the very, very specific conditions of someone asking me how old I was, having just told me they were 20, I could imply that I was, too, and it wouldn't be lying - technically.
(I liked 22, though, and I hope you will, too, so it's okay, this was never actually necessary.)
Also, for long, slightly irrational reasons, I've recently fallen in love with Helsinki - from afar, I've never been there - and therefore also with this website: http://www.hel-looks.com/archive/#20110326_05, and I feel like you might appreciate it.
@remedios_la_bella - I adore the joke, and the website. hel-looks has always been a favourite of mine. Thank you so much for the birthday wishes. So far, 22 is shaping up to be pretty okay.
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