You Are Among Friends

Attn: Monmouth College

What is going on up there?

Signed,
A Concerned Alumna

At midnight, Eastern Standard Time, I was sitting on the thinly-carpeted floor of the student center, in a small circle of classmates-turned-friends, thoroughly sloshed on red wine, broadcasting my favorite Marilyn Monroe songs from a borrowed iPod speaker and very nearly crying with joy. A custodian was making his way up the stairs toward us with his cart and clutch of keys, likely thinking that four or five hours was actually plenty long for a post-reading reception to stretch on a weekday, despite our cries to the contrary.

I’m twenty-seven today.

It should come as a surprise to exactly no one that I love my birthday. I love holidays in general, but especially the ones that nod to the passing of time—New Year’s Eve and today. As a writer, I catalogue my observations about myself like a scientist taking field notes, tracking flight patterns. I can't pass up a milemarker as an opportunity for reflection.

That said, here’s what I can say so far, for sure, about years twenty-six to twenty-seven:

• I’ve worn into my first official forehead wrinkle, discovered about eight weeks ago during a routine glance in the bathroom mirror. It was later declared invisible, of course, by my mom and two aunts, while wading in a pooled Montana hot spring as cold rain poured over our heads and into our beers. But I don’t feel threatened by the idea of getting wrinkles, because...
• ...despite my observation that life subsists on very few consistently true truths—overarching facts that never yield to situation or subtleties—one of those truths is that, face-to face, what I used to mistake for beauty is most often actually an open-armed optimism, so stubborn it becomes fascinating.
• Although the institution of marriage remains highly suspect, the institution of happy long-term monogamous relationships has revealed itself to be nothing more threatening than a devastatingly intimate friendship and a daily insistence on loyalty. 
• From our TV screen in our dim living room, a movie sweeps open its story with a gorgeous palette of color and I’m crumbling into tears, seemingly apropos of nothing. Last night, sitting in a top tier of theater seats, watching David Rakoff’s hands move as he read, my eyes burned with salty happiness. At six a.m. this morning, lying in my rented bed and hungover haze with the sound of Steve Urkel squawking through the walls from the next room, I was thinking about how everyone in the room last night—students, professors, writers, most of them strangers—sang Happy Birthday two hours early once my friends started the song, a moment when all the clusters of conversation paused to turn and smile and sing to me; how happy I am, how lucky I am, how funny life is, despite all the shit, and I laughed so hard that I sobbed.

This is my favorite part of aging, so far: I am constantly crying out of nothing but pure, ringing pleasure.

• Red wine before bed now leads to acid reflux while I sleep. Get used to it, throat.

 

Happy birthday to me.

OK I can't like, sit here and BLOG all night because I have homework to do and this is 100% procrastination, but I just made some delicious coffee in the ol' French press and a) I wanted an excuse to brag about that because it sounds fancy and requires a scrap of effort and b) I wanted to tell you the story of how I got this giant coffee mug shaped like a giraffe.

Well actually, I guess it isn't really shaped like a giraffe. It's shaped like a cup, but it's painted like a giraffe, and it has a giraffe neck protruding from the top with a giraffe head attached, appropriately enough, at the end of the neck. As a coffee cup, it is totally impractical. The head, as you can see, includes pointy little ceramic ears and horns, making the thing downright painful to hold by the handle, especially with hands as lily-white and delicate as mine. So you have to hold it by the mug part, which traditionally houses the boiling hot coffee part. Engineering department, please! Anyway, on to the story.

One day I got a smallish box in the mail. This package was left on our front porch, and it had a return address written on it--San Francisco, I think. Definitely California. There was no name with the return address. Inside the box were some packing peanuts and this mug with a giraffe neck and that is it. When I opened it, I stood in the kitchen staring at it for a long time. The whole thing seemed like a mistake, like a wrong number on the phone, except that the package had been very clearly addressed to me, Lindsey J. Markel, in black Sharpie. I tried to think of who I knew in San Francisco, but the only people I know who live there are the Tanner family, and they are not even real. I tried to remember if I had an inside joke with anyone involving a giraffe, or coffee, or cups, or mail. I tried to think of who knew my address, including apartment number. It occurred to me that I might have a stalker, and this freaked me out a little bit, until I figured it was probably okay to have a stalker that lives like seven states away whose preferred method of terrorism is sending hilarious giant coffee mugs through the mail.

I am telling you this because I still don't know where this coffee mug came from. It sat on the kitchen counter for a number of months, untouched, as a weird little decoration--also, it is too big to fit in the cup cabinet--and then one Saturday morning I picked it up and declared it my signature mug of choice. I mean, I don't even know if I want to know where it came from anymore. Mystery, like coffee, is one of the spices of life, non?

But seriously, if you sent me this thing, get in touch. I need to know I won't be waking up with a giraffe head in my bed anytime soon.