Philly – extra strong opinions

I’ve been learning to release my fascia, and I don’t think it’s my imagination that I’m becoming more open in other ways too. I’m finding, for instance, that with the right attitude, you can learn to enjoy other people’s birthdays just as much as your own. Tons of my friends have birthdays right now—what is it about, would it be May? June?–so I’ve been trying to think of creative ways to celebrate with them in this shitty weather. Damn it. I’ve been using too much unladylike language recently. I dropped a jar of whole grain mustard on the floor on Sunday, and what was going to be the perfect post-run avocado toast* ended up going limp while I cleaned up, so I said several of the best HBO words right in a row. “You know those are French words,” I told my children, but they had already learned them from their cousin.

When I was trying to feel Christine out a little bit about how she’d like to celebrate her birthday, she did this gently patronizing thing I’ve watched her do with other people, where she is so clearly not wanting to go along with whatever they’re proposing, but she lets them go ahead and give their whole pitch anyway. Ha! Chumps! Shoot, I didn’t know it could work on me, but I learned several days later that she really did not want to spend her birthday watching me sing karaoke. Anyway–and I’m pretty sure I had nothing to do with this, because if I had, I would have called ahead to order a whole suckling pig for the table–the next thing I knew we were all at Brauhaus Schmitz, drinking large beers and tiny glasses of fennel schnapps, and eating everything on the menu I thought I might enjoy trying to pronounce: Kartoffelpuffer. Apfelmus. Flammkuchen.

Oh, you know, now I’m remembering the non-fennel schnapps at the end of the night that no one else was enough of a German literature major to drink. One of Jay’s friends handed that to me, which reminds me that we were celebrating his birthday too, which is at least one of the reasons a big cool group of P.A.s showed up on their way out to [the discotheque?]. Yes, because I remember Jay was definitely not wearing the birthday hat we bought him at Concord Mall, but he will have plenty of chances. And now that I’ve been there, well beyond the shoeshine place, I’m thinking I might go back to Concord Mall for more hats. Because if you’re counting, you may notice I have two more birthdays to mention. TBC…

*trendy and delicious

When I get the feeling a dinner party is winding down, I like to pass out a nice digestif–a white port or airplane bottles of Jägermeister. Depending on how that goes over, I might then ask if anybody wants to go to Philly, which tends to make me feel a little like a sitcom dad trying to get laid. I wonder if they, too, get their feelings hurt when they are rebuffed every day except their birthday. I always rein it in though, because appearances are so important (I didn’t say to me–that would sound shallow.) An aside: I was talking to Cookie the other day about how much I think I would enjoy being the girl Jimmy Buffett, except that–my talent for rhyme and my enthusiasm for mustaches of all thicknesses aside–I would just end up looking like some lush with a tambourine (I don’t play the guitar) because middle aged girl drunks are somewhat less accepted. I’ve been self-Pygmalioning my tipsy voice ever since I heard it on the iPhone video where Kay and I were trying to find a fox(?) on the walk home from Murph’s(?) in recognition of that particular double standard. Darn. You know, I think the Jimmy Buffett conversation was with Jay, not Cookie. I must have been pretty high at the time. On alcohol, mother. No, wait–life.

The problem is, and I’m not blaming anyone in particular here, but when I don’t get to go to Philly, that energy has to be redirected somewhere (I took two semesters of physics for non-majors–I’m pretty sure this is called “friction”) and a lot of times I redirect the energy into getting injured. I tried to get people to go to Philly, at least in spirit, when we were in St. Lucia last week, and they totally wouldn’t, so I fell down the steps. This might mean I won’t get to run the New York Marathon on Sunday, or that my heel will start bleeding and I will have to cut out early and find a falafel cart. I bet I will also cry, tears usually reserved for certain less-pageanty passages of Beethoven, and the time I swallowed a fly while running in Brandywine Creek State Park. But that’s a good thing, because a lot of people think I don’t have feelings, which isn’t true. Also I bleed a lot.