45

Contrary to my earlier plans this week to finally get that tattoo on birthday (the peony on my inside shoulder) I bailed and instead am spending the day sleeping late and cleaning my apartment from top to bottom, which may not sound like birthday fun, but you can only dodge tiny tufts of cat hair (April is prime molting season for the two mainecoons) so long before madness sets in  ...Last night, I also spent a bit of the tattoo money on this set of ikea drawers for the studio, which may make me happier than the tattoo in the long run.   It's not completely off the table, but it is at least off the table for the time being. Instead, I will continue to make my fun with temporary tattoos on occasion, which don't require permanence and sitting in one place for several hours while someone stabs you with needles.   (all of which was making me way too anxious to start this particular year of my life..)

ll I do know is that this birthday is far less traumatizing than turning 25, at which point my life was about to be thrown into complete upheaval after grad school, and is probably better than turning 35, of which  I remember nothing of particular note at all (though according to the blog, it was a rainy day at the CPL Poetry Fest).   When I was 15, I did get my very first diary, so thirty years ago, you have the grandparent of this very blog, which was more about cats and boys and how much I fought with my mother than anything I write today. I do find myself I suppose firmly ensconced in that thing they call "middle age" at long last, no getting past it, but hopefully I endured my mini-crises a couple months back and have emerged victorious. If anything it was less about getting older and more about having more to lose and less to look forward to--more death and loss and less good things.  But you make the good things, I suppose. And hopefully they outweigh the bad even until the end...

So my good things today are not having to work at the library, some good coffee, a clean apartment, some new flat file-size drawers, maybe some chinese food for dinner.  Tomorrow, a whole day in the studio finishing up all sorts of things and  then a weekend entirely free in a blissfully clean (ish)  apartment.  And,while still a little chilly outside, the  leaves are slowly coming in on the trees and the magnolias just about to bloom...