Birthday Weekend

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

As with every NYC parade, the sound of bagpipes is filtering through my office this morning. It's a blessing and a curse to be close to fifth avenue on parade days!

It's been a bit of a slow, under the weather, week for me. W and I spent the rainy weekend in CT celebrating my dad's birthday. We helped assemble a (complicated) German Forest Cake, and then had a special dinner of cheese and beef fondue. Of course, the birthday boy was is in charge of lighting the fondue. My father is well known for wreaking havoc when allowed to play with fire. Happy Birthday Dad!

I hope you are all doing well and enjoying the extra daylight!

And so it has begun…

The birthday celebrations have started. This afternoon, the design team at work took me out to a lovely sushi lunch. This evening I unwrapped the present my sister had sent from Los Angeles. Tomorrow, a car will pick me up at 6:30 am, bound for JFK. I will spend a long weekend in Seattle with my boyfriend W, exploring a new city. On Saturday, we will go out to a nice dinner. I have a new dress and new (rather high) heels. On Saturday, I will be 30.

I have always been the youngest of my friends, and part of me has been thirty for months now. Just a few weeks ago, I was filling out a form in a doctor’s office, and had to cross out the “3” I had written, after I remembered I was technically still in my twenties. Part of me is taking this milestone completely in stride. The logical, practical, solid, side of me. And then there is the part of me that is not. The part of me that looks back at the last five years with panic and wonders if I made the right choices, if I pushed hard enough to advance my life, if I made the right decisions. I have always been more partial to action than to in-action. The numbing suction of routine scares me. I am afraid that one day I will blink and time will have flown by, and I will have missed something. Some unknown, unseen, mystical something. My inclination is toward drastic moves. Toward packing up and shipping off and sleeping in my tent somewhere new. Because new cannot be routine or boring. New places and new situations force us to be aware; each day can feel like a week. We can live whole lifetimes in new places.

So, on this birthday, as I look back at my twenties, I am breathing deeply, and resisting the urge to change my life drastically. Rather than throwing caution to the wind and setting sail for exotic ports, I am starting this blog. I hope that it is the start of small, but important changes in my life. I hope to spend more time writing and taking photographs. I hope to appreciate the small things in my life, and to share them with all of you. I hope this blog will chronicle the many unexpected twists and turns of the year ahead, as I embrace this new decade. This clean, fresh, brand-new decade.