Dirty One

Being firmly on the wrong side of thirty and hanging out with all early-20s kidlings on the eve of your birthday means you take a stock of your life. You think of how you used to be. To add to that, all your friends, including the 'complicated' ones -- the drunks, the chimneys, the yummy mummies, the divorced, the single-after-thirty -- also come to celebrate. All this makes you take a stock of life, of what you have, what it could've been, what you've done, what you've left behind. And you come to one conclusion, that even if you're given a choice, you wouldn't want to change where you are and how you are, perhaps. There are things you'd perhaps change in the journey, but not the fact that despite your warts and transgressions and murky past and the Annus horribilis, you're here, now, blowing 'a' candle, cutting a cake and licking the icing off your fingers, and just feeling very very loved.

Something will perhaps never change -- that I love receiving phone calls at midnight, and jump with joy each time I rip open the wrapping paper to discover what's inside, and stare at my phone waiting for the phone calls. Some people ask me to grow up, some people ask me to change, they can go, umm, fuck themselves, because now, being this old, I do know that the moment I lose that excitement, that nervousness of what lies ahead, I might as well die.

This year, I gift myself a re-solution -- something you'll see tomorrow or day after.
Right now, I am here, now.