For my birthday

I had breakfast in bed. No. Must've been someone else's birthday.

I got flowers. No. Those were 70 pounds of Employee Handbooks.

Dinner and danci- Um, nope. I did stop at the grocery store, thinking to pick up a single slice of something celebratory and I looked at the array of Scary Red Velvet Cupcakes and monolithic, sticky squares of white cake with strawberry goo or what looked like Vaseline between the layers and bought a Snicker's bar instead.

The first email of the day (at home) was from a complete stranger who is either illiterate, for whom English is not her first language, or who was deliberately pushing my buttons by writing in Engrish. (It was 6:10 AM. On my birthday. I have friends that evil. I'm allowed to be paranoid.)  The writer "wanna make junihitoe." This is not the sort of email one should ever have to read when barely awake. I sent her a brief, polite, "Here, check out these links," note later in the day. All you junihitoe pattern are belong to us.

The first birthday greeting of the day was from JAF, to whom it had only just occurred to ask for an explanation as to why he knows me as "Makiwara" (still my handle over on the Tousando) and why nobody else seemed to know who he was addressing at the GWW sake tasting. The IM exchange was, considering my lack-of-awakeness at that hour, rather, OK, I'm gonna say it. Cute.

Got a lot of notes over on FB, and a phone call from my Mom, Dad having called me last night to tell me Wolf Hall is in the mail. Mom used to be appalled when he'd wrap up a book he'd recently read and give it to me for my birthday or Christmas, on the grounds he was being cheap. OK, maybe it is cheap, but it's also, "I read this, I think you'd like it." In most cases I usually do, though Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart is one recent exception. I just couldn't get into it. So I started doing it back. Reminds me, should have a look at the paperback pile and pick something to send him. Hmm, maybe the Murakami. The Windup Bird Chronicle was pretty out there.

Fellow Birthday Boy Dave Brubeck turns a swingin' 95 today.