Everything Happened | vol. 235

Dull as dirt tbh

At 5:45 am on my 38th birthday, my friend pulled up to my house in the purply pre-dawn and I waved to her from my living room to let her know I was omw!!! Be right there!

I got in her Volvo and probably mentioned for the billionth time that it smells like the “leather” fragrance spray we had on offer at Car Wash HQ, the full-service car wash where I worked in high school. A combo of “leather” and “new car” scent. I probably told her about Francis, the guy I worked with there who would spray his preferred car fragrance sprays ON HIS NECK in case any “fine females” came through his service lane in their cars. Francis don’t be putting that on your skin!

When I scanned in at the Y, the computer played “Happy Birthday!” which I barely clocked because I didn’t have my hearing aid in and because I’m always way way up in my head. Everyone in the gym lobby paused, though, and said, “It’s your birthday?” and by the time I had caught up to it all, I was blushing.

Then Hillary and I lifted barbells in predictable rhythms to remixes of pop music at BodyPump for an hour. I worried that Erica, the instructor, might somehow know that it was my birthday (main character disease) and embarrass me, but of course she didn’t. I had Hillary take me through the Dunkin drive-thru on the way home and we both got huge cold brews. I’m always the kid sister, the passenger princess, the baby who needs picked up in Mom’s Volvo in order to get my ass to the gym for an early class.

I thought about how my brother would take me through the McDonald’s drive-thru on the way to high school so we could both get coffees. And how sometimes the drive-thru worker was my brother’s classmate, Zach, who was on work-study, meaning he only went to high school half the day because he was, I want to say, the assistant manager of our local McDonald’s? And how one time Zach implied I was my brother’s date and Dan and I both reacted so strongly to this disgusting implication that Zach kept up the bit to troll us. And how eventually my brother started driving his friend Sean to school too, which meant I had to sit in the back, which sucked but was also a relief because it meant Zach’s bit no longer really worked.

Hillary dropped me off back at home, where Desi was now awake and watching a blue-haired streamer explain Minecraft. Instead of remembering that I want to figure out how to delete Youtube from the TV, I allowed myself to be happy to see him with his amazing Robert Smith bedhead in his Pokemon pajamas which make him still look so little, which he is, but of course, he also isn’t.

One of my favorite things about Desi is his lack of precocity. He’s intelligent, a whiz at academics, but not overly mature. No one would call him an old soul. I suffered from precocity and it ruined my life because if you’ve been told your whole childhood that the most special thing about you is how falsely grown you seem, what do you have left when you’re finally grown? Desi is less mature than his peers and to that I say, great, there’s no rush.

I leashed the dog who is whining at this point and jamming her whiskered snoot into my palm over and over again in desperation and we walk the neighborhood while I think lustful thoughts about my neighbor’s plants that seal my fate as a person not allowed into heaven. Our last place in Columbus, when we moved in, my mom came to the house while I was at work and dug a bed along the front and planted a bunch of hostas she’d divided from her own garden. And while I was 30+ and married with a kid at that point, I remember telling her, Mom that’s fine if you want to do that, but I just want to let you know that I will never care about hostas. I won’t think about them. I will forget about them. They don’t exist to me. I can’t see them.

When I tell you all I think about is stealing people’s hostas these days. I have hostas. I can afford to buy and plant hostas for myself. But I see an overgrown Audrey II from Little Shop of Horrors lookin thing while my dog is taking a shit, and I have powerful fantasies of going out under cover of darkness with a spade and a Hefty bag and skimming shoots off allllllll the hostas that are spreading beyond reason. Rehoming them to my fiefdom. And sitting in my bird-shit-streaked plastic adirondack chair on my front porch and admiring them while I hit my little weed pen and wish it were a cigarette. In my more Ted Bundy-ish moments, I twist it in my head so that I’d actually be doing them a favor.

When I get home, all of the kids are up and Nick is trying to get people dressed and fed and I am allowing myself to be at a collegial remove from the scrum because it is my birthday. The big kids get on the bus and Nick takes Polly to daycare and I take a shower but not my hair because I have a bunch of client calls and my hair texture only becomes ready for prime time once I have slept on it one time, minimum.

I have therapy at 10 a.m. which I take walking around outside and talking on the phone which is maybe the only way I’ll do it from now on? I have a newer therapist so we are mostly still in the phase of me doing surface bits about people I know and when I get off the phone I am able to feel buzzy and warm because someone listened to me and nothing got too serious. I do not mention to my therapist, for example, that as a birthday gift to myself I have booked a session with a psychic, something that nearly everyone I know would clock as a cry for help. (More on that later???? Maybe??? I’m truly fine!!)

I worked a pretty typical day at my work-from-home computer job. My big kids had a half day at school but they are old enough now that they can let themselves in and rot in their preferred manner without saying a word to me. Nick brings Polly home after work with a huge glass cylinder of flowers, the most Lana Del Rey-coded peonies I’ve ever seen, and irises and snapdragons that are positively off their meds. Jane informs me that the peonies, which are the size of salad plates, are the color of the Nether in Minecraft. Despite knowing this fact against my will, I have to concede that she is correct.

We go to my favorite local restaurant which is always out of everything I want to order but we do not hold it against them. The kids act like assholes there and I briefly regret our passive choice to not be a tablets in public family, because were these?? the vibes?? we were hoping to preserve? But I do not expect restaurant experiences to be chill because I have three little kids and am not an idiot, so I keep busy inhaling the vegan al pastor tacos that they actually had for once and chugging a Dos Equis that tastes like frosty cold bong water.

Polly 100% cannot hang but we order churros which she is able to briefly go snake mode on before resuming her rampage. I tell the kids of the time I didn’t let their dad get churros from a cart in Oaxaca because we were rushing to do something else and then we never saw another churro cart our entire visit, not one!!! churro cart!! Everyone agrees: I am a monster.

Wouldn’t say we “got the shot”

At home, I receive my tokens. Nick has bought all the gifts and allowed the kids to shop them like it’s a mom’s birthday mall and they are proud to have something substantial to offer. My big gift from Nick is a drawing tablet which I hope to fiddle with while watching TV at night instead of [only] scrolling.

Twenty years ago, I celebrated my 18th birthday in Columbus with my parents. I had talked them into letting me stay with my brother over the weekend at college there, but it was all a cover for sneaking around unsupervised in a different city. I can’t remember where I woke up the morning of combo birthday/Mother’s Day brunch, but I know I’d found a house show that night and adjacent to the house show was a gas station where I bought cigarettes at midnight with my newfound legality. Then I was at an Indian restaurant with my mom, dad, and brother for lunch and my throat was thick from smoking and I was so hungover that I had to angle my chair away from the window and I couldn’t complain about the restaurant because I’m sure it was selected to accommodate my vegetarianism but the last thing I wanted to put in my curdled stomach was hot, spicy, oily curries.

The next day I had to go do high school, probably had to take an AP test since it was May, even though I had done the kind of partying that if I did it now, I’d need two weeks and IV fluids to recover.

But the night of my 38th birthday, I did not have to do any homework, I just got to watch new episodes of Hacks on the couch with Nick and dream of plant crime and go to bed well before midnight. I mean, as you’ll recall, I’d been up at 5 lifting weights to Tiësto with senior citizens.

I am the oldest baby I know and the youngest elderly person too and can any of it be boring if it doesn’t bore me, specifically? Because I’m not bored by being boring. I’m dialed in, dying to know what’s next.

yr mate,
Evie
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