Anyway, I came in with a spring in my step as I began bidding my final farewells to my twenty-fourth year. My dad wished me an almost-birthday, my mom had put a picture of me up on the desktop, and we ate curry and rice for dinner. The curry has nothing to do with my birthday. I just fucking love curry.
I went up to my room to pick out a birthday outfit and call some people about potential birthday plans...and then I saw the condition of my room. Let's just say that, if I were a burn-out teenager trying to stick it to the man by making a mess and wearing black lipstick, my room would be fine. But this is the bedroom of a twenty-five-year-old, who's lived in New York City and graduated from college and writes papers dissecting literary theory. Or at least, it's supposed to be.
But in all honesty, my room is a joke right now. There's an empty box for a box fan. There's no god damn box fan in my room. Just the box. I've got a different fan in here, a little oscillating fan on a shelf by the window (no box to be seen) which I made room for by dumping everything on it onto my desk. My desk, by the way, hasn't been able to be used as a desk since around the time I moved back into my parents house in December, but right now it is a please-call-FEMA level disaster. There's a plastic grocery bag underneath a book underneath a handcarved wooden incense burner underneath my big iPod dock, which has the cords draped around it like a lounging Greek Cesar. It's like the leaning tower of however much random shit I can absentmindedly stack in my room. There's a tissue neatly folded up on the corner--why this is folded instead of the army of clothes on my floor is yet another myster. There's an empty bottle of perfume, a glass that once had a candle in that is now a lightly scented dust collector, and what looks like a movie ticket stub. There's also a stack of books there; it's the hardcover Divergent trilogy, which has a pretty little cardboard sleeve that probably took one look at my room and said, "Fuck this, I'd rather be in Dauntless."
I think my favorite part of this mess is the chair. Yup, there's a chair. I discovered it as I was digging through what I had been referring to as the "too dirty for the closet, too clean for the floor" pile. I had seen the chair in my room, because I have eyes that can recognize shapes, but I had forgotten that it has a purpose as a chair and not just a clothes dispensary, until I started digging around in that pile of clothes and my hand hit something hard. It was sort of like that moment in movies about treasure hunters where the protagonists are digging, talking about how hopeless everything is and how stupid they were for going on this crazy adventure, when suddenly one of their shovels hits something hard and hollow. Only I didn't look up into Matthew McConaughey's stunned eyes to recognize the same holy-shit-we-found-it look that I was giving him. It was just me, saying, "Well, I didn't find any clean underwear. But hey, a chair! Also, I'm disgusting."
So I decided to do something that goes against my natural impulse and did the mature, twenty-five-year-old thing to do: I started cleaning straight away. I put on some good music, folded my clothes, vacuumed the floor, dusted all that needed to be dusted, and put my books away in alphabetical order. My new year will begin with freshness of room, body, and spirit.
Nope! I described it to you online because fuck you it's my birthday.
Photo Cred:
Cheap old people food: have no idea what the website is about because it's my birthday.
He-looks-like-a-man-with-poor-leadership-skills guy: this website. This movie was almost a great book adaptation until it suddenly wasn't. Not a great birthday present.
Gel Mibson's alien experience: didn't read this site either, happy birthday to me. I think it's a blog and possibly inspirational. Don't care.
Fool's Gold, not to be confused with Oscar gold: this Rotten Tomatoes quiz that I neither read nor took because birthday.