It was very pleasant, this birthday. I had thought desultorily of giving myself a party, but the event fell on a weeknight so I gave up the notion. I don't care for socializing on weeknights if I can avoid it. I'm always enervated and often crabby after a long day of informing my clients that they're A) dreaming, B) misinformed, C) annoying me by not giving me all the data so I can give them a sensible answer, or D) lovely, intelligent people who deserve a terrific vacation and they have come to the right place.
I find it demands a lot of effort to sell travel. I imagine that's true of sales in general, but I wouldn't know because I was never in sales until I became a travel agent. It's hard! You have to be all things to all people: firm, understanding, pushy, realistic, playful, sensitive, professional, and above all psychic. Usually not all at once, but you need to be prepared to pull the right rabbit out of the hat at any time. Plus you have to keep your eye on the main goal which is making money, service rendered for a financial return. So many people try to get detailed information over the phone now so they can go straight to the Internet to book, a new twist in time wasting, the scourge of retail everywhere. After a day of juggling personas and being clever I just want to loaf around.
So that's what I did. I was treated to dinner by my husband, opened my presents from Kymm and Amelia, speculated on what is in the package being held hostage by the USPS because it's certified and we aren't home during the day, and discovered I can't access my email. Oh well! Tra la! Who needs email when I have "The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring" on DVD now and can watch Billy Boyd and Orlando Bloom to my heart's content. I read the A.S. Byatt collection (The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye) in about five hours, and plan to reread it slowly so as to savour the prose.
After I walk the dog I will go to bed at a reasonable hour for me, which is to say before one. I need more sleep. I was woken by a small black cat at 5:15, 5:21, 5:30, 5:32, and finally 5:40 this morning. The constant treading upon my hair and rubbing her purring face against mine gave me a fearsome tension headache as I tried to get her to leave me alone. No dice. Finally, I got up and went to feed her. Imagine my ire when I found the food bowl had food in it and she just wanted company. Imagine really quiet ire, because John wasn't up yet. Advil, milk, back to bed for an hour, then up to shower and change and dash out the house. No different than most mornings, really, except I had presents from my co-workers on my desk and a cheesecake of superb density for a treat after lunch. Take that, Weight Watchers, we all said. Birthday calories don't count!
I have birthday money to spend, and so does John. We've decided to pool our stash and buy a DVD player for the TV room. I want to watch my growing collection of DVDs on as big a screen as I can find, and John's making the switch from laser discs which are on their way to becoming obsolete technology. I think this weekend we'll go out and do some shopping. It's my last weekend without homework for a while. Might as well continue the celebratory feeling as long as I can.
You want to know a secret? 45 doesn't feel any different than 32. It really doesn't, despite all the changes I've been through, all the life experience under my belt, all the signs of being in my middle years. I think this is probably the weirdest part about getting older. My body changes, but I am somehow the same only more so, as though I were born a ghost and gradually acquire solid form as the years go on.
Goodbye, birthday. See you next year.
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