My birthday was great. I slept late thanks to a collaborative effort between Keith and Raffi and then went to work, sort of, at this podcast that I am not going to do for much longer but which has been mostly a lot of fun. I felt awake and not stupid as we talked about the author’s book. I’m leaving the podcast because I need to only have things in my life that are either 100% fun or 100% work – and if work, it has to be work that I care about deeply and/or that I’m getting paid well to do. Anything else is impossible to justify. I had suspected this would happen after I had a baby but I also hoped it wouldn’t. Things that are 70% fun/30% badly paid work have a strange appeal. They’ve comprised a lot of my life so far. Sometimes they surprise you by turning into one of the other categories but more often they don’t. 

After the podcast I was hungry but in too much of a rush to eat so I got a smoothie (gross) and went to the Sprint store to get a new phone to replace the one I lost on the way to the Vegas airport (long story, not relevant) and when I walked in the woman who worked there seemed like she was going to be quiet and surly but then I mentioned mercury retrograde and she turned awesome. By the end of our customer service interaction I was obsessed with her. Mercury retro turned her life upside down – she had been working at a different store, she had a different boyfriend, et cetera. On the ride home, I enjoyed a few final peaceful moments of not having a phone. I read the print NYT, the science part, about the discovery of an ancient horse skeleton. 

Then I got home and my baby was there and he was in a great mood. I had been away from him just long enough to start missing him pretty badly. He currently loves being bounced in a lap and finds it wildly hilarious. He also loves it when you pretend you’re going to eat his face and go “rrararrararrr” near his fat cheek. I hope our babysitter does this stuff when we’re not here. I want to tell her “bounce him! pretend to eat his cheek!” but you can’t really tell someone to do stuff like that even if you are paying them.  (Can you? I have no idea how this works. I wouldn’t though. I’m sure whatever she does with him is fine and the less I know about it the better.) 

After Raffi went to bed I went out to dinner in a restaurant after dark sans baby for the first time in four months with my best friends, the purest bliss imaginable.  I came home and fell into bed and woke up at 2am to pump, it was no longer my birthday, I was 34 now and it was just the rest of my life.