Ecstatic Adventures of the Exuberant Bodhisattva: How I Am Old

28 years ago today, I was cut out of my mother’s stomach. I was headed out the vagina feet first, which isn’t usually recommended. Legend has it that my father turned white as a ghost. My mother said that after she knew I was okay, she thought that she might die, but that it would be okay because I was already born.

Mother, Sister, Me. All of us born.

I heard of a pregnant lady who’s getting a planned c-section this Thursday, on Halloween. A Halloween Caesarean. I feel like if it were my caesarean, I’d pick another day.

Today, I am overwhelmed with Facebook, text, and other digital birthday love. Even Google seems to know that it’s my birthday. There are colourful cupcakes and cakes on the homepage. Thank you Google, but thank you more to all the other real people I’ve met in real life and who remembered me.

On the bus this morning, I decided I would make a clichéd list about things that make me old.

1. A small bunion is growing on the inside of my left foot. Despite years of diligently spreading my toes barefoot or wearing devastatingly practical shoes. Also, I think spider veins on my legs are in my near future. So be it. My short shorts aren’t going anywhere.

Long Live the Kino Shorts

2. I like to go to bed at 9 P.M. Even better is to go to bed at 8 P.M. and read library books until I fall asleep. Conversations after 9 P.M. exhaust me. Parties are the worst. No part of my body can make peace with why I am upright, awake and speaking. My bedtime is geriatric.

3. I hate the people on the bus who blast horrible music through their headphones with the arrogant assumption that I might like to hear their lyrics word for word. One afternoon I asked some dude on the 80 if he might like to mute the video game music that was massacring my ears. He looked at me with enormous disdain and called me a stupid fucking c-word. So now, on the bus, I say nothing. I sit, sighing, glaring and shaking my head like a seething eighty-year-old woman.

And that’s it. Otherwise, I am not very old. I look back on words and photographs from every year of my life, and even from last week, and I think, what a baby, you’re so young. As though the person looking back is so wise and aged. A week later, a year later it will be the same thing. Me looking at me, so young.