Every Day is Marne Gras

Yesterday was my birthday.

Birthdays and I have a pretty terrible track record. When I turned six I had recently entered a phase of being petrified of getting my hair cut. My birthday party, was then, of course, in a hair salon, complete with clown (terrified), face paint (terrified), and aqua net.

Then there was the year I had a sleepover party and encouraged everyone to get a book out of my bookshelf and read to themselves.

Two years ago I celebrated my birthday with a few friends at Cedar Point, an amusement park with an impressive collection of the highest, fastest, most sickening roller coasters in the world. We all got migraines (from our heads banging against the headrests of the coasters the whole day) and second degree sunburns. Everyone stared at us because, well, we were five homos in a theme park. The day improved slightly when we got to stand in line for an hour behind a group of mennonites.

Last year, two days before my birthday I broke up with the girl I had been seeing for a couple of months. Two days before my birthday it felt like the right thing to do and not long after my birthday it again felt like a good decision, but no amount of certainty that your relationship needs to end asap will make drinking alone on your birthday feel any less unspecial and awful. I spent most of that day reading Michelle Tea’s Valencia in a park in Ohio, trying to imagine if my life in Seattle would be anything like this book about queers in San Francisco. Some friends of mine did some pity drinking with me (they sat uncomfortably in front of their chocolate martinis while I gulped down my free birthday drink and then we went home and I went to bed slightly tipsy and sad).

I think the problem is that in the past, I’ve been uncomfortable about wanting attention on my birthday; i’ve always done this smarmy little song and dance about not wanting to celebrate, not wanting any attention or any gifts, when, really, all I want is for Dubya to declare May 7th a national holiday in honor of my having been born. But this past year has been exhausting and not especially sunny: I have not seen my family since Chanukkah, i have not seen most of my friends in upwards of a year, and I put on some weight and can’t seem to figure out how to pay off my loans and still do what I want to do with my life.

So it was kind of mentally effortless to throw my hands up, take two days off of work, and say to my new, seattle friends “let’s celebrate me! let’s spend the whole day talking about how great it is that i’m alive! hooray for me!”

Short of a few hundred hours in therapy, weekly massages, and laundry detergent, this was exactly what I needed.

Early in the morning I got crumpets with a friend at The Crumpet Shop in Pike Place Market. Crumpets, as in, more than one crumpet. Two crumpets! I couldn’t decide between sweet and savory, so I got both… because it was my birthday and I already invested in pants that are slightly bigger than I am in anticipation of me gaining even more weight. Always prepared; it’s the boy scout in me.

Crumpets are like English muffins with class. They are soft. They can be slathered in nutella and honey. They are perfect with tea. They go well with eggs. They can be eaten for breakfast, lunch, or dinner. They are dirt cheap. I love crumpets. I want to marry crumpets. Madonna’s fake english accent must make her feel closer to them. I get it now.

A couple of weeks ago I won some free passes to Hot House Spa in a staff appreciation raffle, so in the afternoon I went to the spa. I had heard about Hot House shortly after moving to Seattle, but I never checked it out because it sounded a lot like some bad holdover from the days of second wave feminism and lesbian separatism. Plus, it didn’t actually sound that relaxing. It’s not like the facial/mudbath/chemical peel type spa that my parents are so fond of; they have a hot tub, a sauna, and a steam room, with a couple other amenities.

Oh my. I was wrong. Hot House is the happiest place on earth. It is warm, and peaceful, and the water is HOT and the sauna is HOT and the steam room is HOT and you sweat like crazy. I hate being cold and I am cold all the time in Seattle, and it was great to just feel hot and relax. It was also nice to stretch in the relaxation area afterwards; I had a moment where I was doing downward dog in just my underpants, and I was very, very pleased.

After I recovered from the spa (my skin felt great, but my mind felt like mush and I was dizzy like whoa), I put on my one fancy outfit (a pair of black leather shoes from the little boy’s section at Aldo and a dark blue oxford; I’ll admit, my ability to set trends might be on the decline) and attempted to go to Elemental@Gasworks with some other friends. Elemental is a crazy restaurant with five tables where the owners are eccentric and stick wine in your face without telling you what it is and you stay there for many hours and eat weird new american foods and get toasted and feel very good about the up and coming wallingford cuisine. Or something. Anyway, we got shut out; there was a two hour wait for the next seating, so we went up to Carmelita, the hoity toity vegetarian almost identical twin sister of Cafe Flora, which I’d already been to (the highlight of that meal was realizing, while chowing down on the portabello wellingtons, that i was actually eating a very dolled up version of a hot pocket).

Vegetarian restaurants are off-putting to me. You think they’d rather define themselves by what they do serve, rather than by what they don’t. The menu is full of cheesy, pasta-based dishes, which is not really exciting for vegetarian folks after awhile, and the offerings are sort of all over the place as far as what they offer. I don’t get it; vegetables are exciting. They don’t need to be a garnish for cheesy pasta, especially in a vegetarian restaurant.

The food was good, and I was in excellent company, and they threw free sorbet at us when they found out it was my birthday (and they put a candle in my chocolate muk muk so I could blow out a candle on my birthday, very nice). From the murals on the wall down to the manchego on the antipasti platter, it was the absolute picture of lovely. I felt special and loved and happy and unrushed and calm.

We capped off the night by dancing. My friends indulged me in publicly getting my groove on, and I had an excellent time shaking it and getting every last ounce of self-indulgence out of the last hour of my birthday. I was happy. It was good. I am older.