Birthday Blog (part 2)

It was the beginning of a good stretch. In the summer of 2002, I spent my birthday in Sorrento, Italy riding bitch on a Vespa controlled by a 300 lb. Italian girl. It was very late at night, and I had lost my traveling partner, Lucas, in the process of partying. I’ve also spent a birthday alone in Fort Green, Brooklyn, writing a play in the attic apartment of a British pseudo-socialite who was returning to the mother country for the summer. Friends had stopped by, and it was more of me just being a sad birthday princess that led me to staying up all night. Seeing the sun come up from a Brooklyn rooftop, the morning after you turn twenty-five…or, twenty-six. I can’t remember. Either way, it was a moment. I also thought I was twenty-nine, when I was twenty-eight, so I was twenty-nine twice. Thirty had been looming for two consecutive years now, so it was time to make a change. In the summer of 2010, the move to San Diego commenced, and was completed the day I entered a new decade of existence.

Virgo is not a sexy astrological sign. That was brought to my attention early on this trip. Everyone is into Geminis, which I feel, is unfair to us ridged plan-oriented people. So, what if we’re inflexible. We pay attention to details. Since it was my special day, Brian and I spent most of it in the air conditioning, playing chess on an iPad, and waiting for the crazy-assed heat to drop down to a pleasant ninety-seven degrees at around nine in the evening. We shot some pool, biked around, ate Korean barbeque tacos and quesadillas out of a truck, and then started eastward across highway 35; the dividing line between East and West Austin. I tried to chat up a couple of girls in a Civic. They told us that the place to go was called Yellow Jacket. We rode our bikes down East Fifth Street, found the spot, locked up our bikes and got a couple of beers. It may have been the closest I have ever felt to being a cowboy. The girls turned out to be less than interested in us when their friends showed up, so we posted up at the bar and promptly fell in love with the three women that were tending.

They were playing a game where they would try to fit in the phrase, “My tits are huge” into conversations. It was an ironic statement in two of the three cases. Brian and I thought that we should join in on the game. They were charming and Texan, and there were three tails hanging from a wooden cross-beam above the bar. Each one was a different length and a different pattern. We asked who’s tail was who’s, and I found it charming that each on did in fact have a tail. Pretty cool place. I feel like I had a pretty good birthday night out here in this desert oasis. I flirted, fell for a sassy bartender, got denied, and rode home with Brian late at night in the desert night air, dodging cars and riding all the way home without getting lost once. I brought up the Virgo thing earlier to explain that since it was my night out, I got to plan the whole thing out, which is something that my people of the sixth sign can appreciate.