Much ado about a birthday

I've been meaning to post this forEVER, but since school has been a bit of a crazy ride lately, all other aspects of life (blogging, writing, playing with T.... showering...) got sidelined. BUT now that all the essays are handed in, seminars taught, professors appeased, I can finally relax a little bit! So here is the original post I created a couple of weeks ago, but didn't have time to clean up & post:

I'm twenty-four now! So far, this is the oldest that I've ever been! In tribute to my new even-numbered, divisible-by-twelve age category, and because I want to deny that the birthday fun is over now that the day has passed, I present you with the Boss Birthday Blog! ("boss," in this case, refers to cool/awesome/terrific, as in, "it's raining chocolate? that's boss!").

This year's birthday was incredibly fun because it was pooled together with three other November birthdays, and thus the Scorpio Party was born; with my Toronto posse and a certain well-coiffed Londonite in town for the weekend, and with the intrepid Jean-Marc and his fearless roommates as hosts, Christina, Courntey, Antonella and I were treated to a night of padded egos and delicious baked goods. Not to mention some incredible gifts, bone-crushing hugs, cheap drinks, and tipsy dancing!

Without further ado and in no particular order, I bring you twenty-four reasons why it feels SO GOOD to turn twenty four!

1. Not too old for Teletubby cake, courtesy of Jiggity-M, the best host ever and certainly the best judge of cake designs the world has known:

2. Old enough to eat cake without getting it all over my face; young enough to still wish cake was an acceptable breakfast food.

1985:

2007:

3. Five years into legal drinking age, I am finally patient enough to develop a somewhat refined taste, thanks to Derek's birthday wine-tasting school:


I was never a big drinker in high school, or even the summer after high school when I was surrounded by teenage bingers at the go-kart track, but I certainly remember my very first ever alcoholic drink. It was a Mike's Hard Lemonade, which I thought was very edgy. I forget how old I was, but it was in the ballpark of fourteen (oh my gosh, ten years ago!), and I was at a field party out behind the Gott water-bottling plant near Feversham. We were all sitting on those lounger deck-chairs that someone had dragged all the way back there from the Gott house, and we had a fire going, right there on the edge of one of the Gott ponds. There was a lot of swimming going on which, as the night wore on, evolved into some skinny dipping and people stealing other people's clothes. I didn't participate in that part but I remember the moment of realization that I wasn't at a 2L-of-Pepsi kind of party. I also remember wondering what would happen if someone got sick in the pond. Would the results end up bottled and sold in vending machines? Anyway, it was Mike's Hard that night, and the only thing I remember clearly is falling asleep far too early to be cool, and waking up far too hungover to doubt that I had passed out of a version of innocence that I didn't even know was under threat. So, ten years on, I'll toast all the members of the Mike's Hard "girlie drink" family, and thank my stars that I've since graduated into the more prestigious class of wine drinkers - even if my wine of choice is $8, and comes from the grocery store (except for the odd contribution from a thoughtful boyfriend who is tired of being given a glass of the stuff each time he visits).

4. Not too old to play in the leaves!


5. At twenty-four, I finally know that to make decent brownies, you must ignore the Baker's Chocolate instructions, which invite you to melt the chocolate and butter together in the microwave. Thanks to Jen, the older and wiser of our pair, I've learned that all kinds of horrifying things will happen if you do that: uneven blending of ingredients, burnt and boiling butter, meltage of the mixing bowl, and general unpleasantness. Double-boiler melting is the ticket!

Here is what Jen & I produced for the Scorpio party, after I learned this hard lesson (not to mention the lesson that one tube of pink icing is not enough for sufficient decoration)


6. I know when it's time for protein! Oh, rubber chicken... why must you smell so fowl?


7. Serious one, so consider skipping if you're only here for the laughs: at 24, I think I have really learned how to make and maintain some of the best friendships I have ever had. Montreal has been kind of me, but these ladies of mine, the Swingin' Sugar Sisters as they've come to be known, the ones who I've gotten to know over the past year and half and who have become some of the most important people to me, have been fantastic beyond words. So, instead of words, a photo montage demonstrating, I hope, the generosity and dedication of these friends of mine. I could never possibly get enough of their company!


8. I've... finally learned how to dance?

That might be a bit of a stretch, but I've definitely learned how to have fun at a bar, and I mean REAL fun, not the kind of "bar fun" that I indulged in during my undergrad, especially during first year. Back then, I lived in the "Zoo," and my best in-residence pal started dating the drummer of the band that played in the basement of the "in" club that year. So we got to skip the line, which was a big deal back then (and I can't deny that I had a bit of a swagger as we were given the ol' nod by the bouncer, in front of everyone who had been waiting for ages to go in). Now I know that picking the emptiest bars, and going with the maximum amount of friends, and not caring who is drinking and who isn't, who is dancing and who is lounging on the [suspiciously-stained] couches, who is coupled up and who is going solo... THAT'S the way to have fun at a bar. Also, $3 beers and the patented Megan one-finger-in-the-air dance move. I'll show you sometime.

9. 24 is the year will I will see Jen & Mark, my all-time-favourite non-blood-related couple, two of my best friends and most dedicated allies, tie the knot!

Some random Jen & Mark memories:






10. I now definitely know the importance of smelling the flowers - and of making sure that the lads who send them to me are made aware of their awesomeness!

From Captial D:


From the J-Dawg:

11. I am currently addicted to the new Stars album. This detail doesn't obviously fit into this list, but it ties into a larger idea: 24 will be another year of new music, and who knows what kind of discoveries will be involved. I'm hoping 24 will also involve some sort of long road trip, with good music playing the entire way. Over the past weeks of essay-writing I've been listening to a lot of Explosions in the Sky/The Album Leaf/Sigur Ros, mellow background-sound kind of stuff, and now I'm SO ready to turn up the volume and get a Gascon Ave. dance party going on. Get the juices flowing again. I found out today that my tri-weekly cardio class is now OVER (I thought there was another week left), so the onus is on me to stir up my own cardio fun - which will, of course, involve loud music.
So, 24: another year of musical memories.

12. It was only once I turned 24 that I went to my FIRST EVER big-city Santa Claus parade. There were floats! There were costumes! There were little kids on their daddies' shoulders!

There were even little elves, who might not have been SO happy to have been dragged out of bed on a cold Saturday morning and made to stand outside for a couple of hours, just to wach Santa trundle past and then turn home:

But I think going out for breakfast was a good incentive!


Giving kids a healthy dose of consumerist cravings with generic superhero enthusiasm:


Bob the Builder has seen better days... and we're concerned about that G.I. Joe in his toolbelt. Hey kids, who wants a little military-industrial complex for Christmas??



13. At 24 years old, I am finally able to say that I've read Ulysses! And, in a related note, that I finally went to Dublin! I guess that latter event happened while I was still 23, but the bragging about it takes place at 24, so it counts.


14. I'm now old enough to feel a bit more legitimate in teaching undergraduates, but still young enough to benefit from Montreal's under-25 dirt-cheap metro pass!

15. Old enough to know how to play pool; young enough to know all the different ways to play with pool cues:

16. Old enough to have moved on from grade school; young enough to have kept the best of grade school alive:


17. Twenty-four years of loving my world. Examples:

Mom!

Derek!

Tycho!

Pizza!

18 & 19 (they count as one) - 24 is going to be exciting: it's the year I leave university (maybe for good!), the year that I head out into the "real" world, and - possibly - the year that I move this show to France! Or somewhere, at least... but, for the sake of having an exciting placeholder, I'll say France.

20. If everything works out, this will be the year that I go see my first ever NHL game! It's all up to Jordan and his ticket-buying skills, but I have faith that it will happen...

21. 24 will be the year that I FINALLY sort through the closet/storage space in the basement of this building, which contains piles and piles of stuff that I seem to have dragged with me from Dundalk to London to Montreal. I get gut-wrenches whenever I think of getting rid of even ONE of those old photos, notes passed in high school classes, journals full of adolescent pining, mix-tapes made from songs recorded off the radio... what do people DO with all of that stuff? Wherever I go this year, I don't think I'll be able to take it all with me. Maybe now that my sister has an actual house, with an actual basement, I can take some recourse in that department. But a lot of that stuff is already in my Grandma's basement. Bits and pieces of me spread out in various family homes... feels strange. But I have this cumbersome sense of all the literal baggage I've been pulling along since leaving home, and I'm looking forward to dealing with that, getting lighter, becoming more free.

I also realize that I have a lot of other stuff that will need getting rid of this year, like the old couch in my living room that I brought here from Woodward, where it had been rescued from a curbside rubbage-heap. It's such an old, ugly couch, with no legs (I've got it up on bricks), and Lord help you if you lift one of the cushions to look at what's festering under there... but I've got so many memories attached to that couch! And to pretty much every single other thing that I own! Oy, sometimes my endless capacity for nostalgia is a bit debilitating.

22. This is the year that I will finish my first novel! Or rather, the first complete draft of my first novel. Who knows how long the whole process will take. But, thanks to Concordia and their uncanny ability to get famous Canadian writers to come and visit us, I got to hang out with Miriam Toews this morning! She wrote A Complicated Kindness, which got lots of press when it came out... I remember hanging up a poster at the UWO bookstore once that had her face on it, and the giant slogan: CANADA NEEDS MORE MIRIAM TOEWS. I looked at that poster everyday when I went to work and kept thinking, "One day, Canada will need more of ME!"

Miriam was SO fantastic, and definitely rebooted my thesis-writing drive, so I'm ready to get back at it. She was just so hilarious and encouraging and spontaneous and, well, fashionable... I wanted to stay in the same room with her all day. Two hours didn't feel like enough.

Here she is!
23. I am that much closer to expanding the Megan-Tycho family:


24. With a Scorpio party to kick off this age, and a fantastic Christmas holiday to look forward to, not to mention all of the unpredictable adventures that await: 24 is going to be exciting, and I just can't wait to find out what it will entail!!!!