26

November really is the best month out of the year. I mean think about it. It’s the time of year when you finally get to bundle up in your scarves and sweaters, all Urban Outfitters tank tops are finally on sale, a Twilight/Harry Potter/Pixar movie is bound to be in a theatre near you, Justin Bieber Christmas music fills the air, pumkin spice latte’s are practically falling from the sky like manna from heaven, and of course it’s my Birthday! This year I turned the big 26 and as one of the cards I received said, “you’ve finally reached an age of no significance at all”. I couldn’t agree more. Gone are the days of having a birthday to look forward to. Birthdays that meant you would be able to drive a car, gamble away in a casino, buy a pack of smokes, enjoy a nice glass of wine, or have lower monthly rate on your car insurance.  More than anything I miss the days of my youth where threatening to uninvite someone from your birthday actually meant something. That was real power.  Reflecting back on my oh so recent life, I’m realizing that I seem to have trouble staying in one place. Over the last 4 years I’ve celebrated the day of my birth in both Washington, Iowa, and California and now Texas is being added to the list.  This time around I thought it would be fun to go with a theme for my party and what better way to ring in the 80 degree Dallas autumn than a Paul Bunyan party? Am I right?? Plus I’d just bought a pair of super cute Clarks boots and I was looking for any reason imaginable to bust em out.  I opted for the hipster Paul Bunyan look and paired my boots, suspenders, J Crew socks and flannel with a pair of cut offs and all I’m saying is the hipsters in Seattle would have been eating me up with a vintage and slightly overpriced spoon. Everybody got real into the theme and I even had a friend dress up as Babe the Blue Ox, complete with a nose ring he bought at Claire’s. It. Was. Awesome. Another friend was generous enough to buy me a birthday cake for the celebration and had even placed a special order with a bakery where he stressed the keywords of PAUL BUNYAN,  AXE, FLANNEL, LUMBER JACK when describing what he wanted the cake to look like.  Something was obviously lost in translation because come a week later, the lights are off, the candles are lit, my friends are singing happy birthday and I look down to see a giant Viking helmet and axe adorning the top of my cake. I mean at least they got the axe part right but I think someone at the bakery needs a little American folklore brush up before they attempt to take the SAT’s for the 5^th time.

With all the love and surprises that came with this birthday also came the inconvenience of having to renew my Driver’s License.  Talk about a buzzkill. It was a huge pain in the butt because of all the paperwork they needed and registering of the car, etc., etc., etc. After hours of internet research, phone calls home, finding the perfect outfit for the picture, and picking out a DMV (or DPS as they call them here) I was finally ready to get er’ done. I made an effort to arrive at the DPS early but after my GPS decided to take me to an abandoned IHOP instead, I was only there 5 minutes before the place opened and it already looked like the line for a homeless shelter. After waiting in line for 45 minutes I finally made it to the front desk to get a number. I thought being an American and having to move to Texas sucked, but it turns out my Korean friend ahead of me in line had me beat. I’m assuming the poor man had just moved here from Korea and like myself he was also on a mission to get a license. Unfortunately he hadn’t been notified that his old Korean license had to be professionally translated before he could get a US one and therefore he waited in line for nothing. My heart went out to him….until it dawned on me that this meant that I had one less person to wait in line behind so I got over it real quickly. The next 2 hours that I spent waiting for my number to be called were pure torture. There had to have been at least 50 people crammed into the waiting area where one baby was screaming bloody murder for a majority of the time and somehow everybody was getting called ahead of me. I of course was alone with no reading material or smart phone to keep my mind occupied so I tried to make small talk with the lady sitting next to me. She was a nurse who had just finished working the night shift at the hospital, which lead to a lot of one-sided conversations as she nodded in and out of consciousness while I just looked like a crazy person.

Now as I previously mentioned, one of the best parts about November are the Twilight movies and I am happy to inform ya’ll that I have indeed gone to see Breaking Dawn: Part 1.  Seeing as I am quickly turning into an old man, I decided to turn down free tickets to see the midnight showing because the thought of getting 4 hours of sleep before work made me want to vomit. Had it been the year 2007 there is no doubt in my mind that I would have been there with my Team Edward t-shirt and body glitter that I picked up from Hot Topic. Many of you may be surprised to hear that I wasn’t too quick to join this whole Twilight wagon. For one thing I’m not much of a reader unless Oprah puts it in her book club, and secondly I thought Vampires were super lame. My friend Meghan convinced me to go to the first movie with her and within 10 minutes I was hooked. Set in Washington?? Forbidden love??? Sexual tension you could cut with a knife?!??!? Non-stop depressing hipster love songs??? Main actors name is Rob!?!?! Seriously, what’s not to love.? All I’m saying is, as usual, the tween inside of me won and since then I’ve seen all the movies, read the books, listened the soundtracks, set up a savings account to save up for my trip to Forks, and regardless of gender I plan on naming my first born EJ (Edward Jacob).  Speaking of first-borns; highlight of the matinee by far had to be the group of teenage girls who left the theatre shaking and crying with their hands covering their eyes as Bella gave what looked like the most painful birth of the century. Shit got real. That scene may just be the best form of birth control Hollywood has ever put out there. Now if only Justin Bieber had made it to an advance screening…too soon?