my heart is a glorious machine;

I've just had the most marvellous birthday ever.

Stories, and photographs, forthcoming. I just wanted it to be known.

I think that every year around my birthday, I say something to the effect of, every year around my birthday, I fall headlong into a roiling pit of existential angst. Which is true, and seems to get truer with every passing year. You know how I say I miss being excited? I really miss being excited right now. My eighteenth birthday's in six days and I haven't got plans, I haven't got the nice bats-in-the-stomach shutting-the-door-so-I-can-wring-my-hands-in-excitement feeling that I always used to have. Though really it's the lack of plans that bothers me most, because as I have said many, many times, I am deeply ritualistic by nature. I like things to be Just So, and I like to arrange them, and surround significant days with significant rituals large and small. Last year Dad and I went to the city, and the art museum, and it was glorious, and I can't think of anything other than that, or anything more significant than that, and you know maybe I just want to get lost in some city somewhere and ride the subway without any destination in mind and take photographs of graffiti and people waiting for buses and lamp-posts and buildings with vines growing all over them and trees growing out of the pavement. I want to do something quiet that I won't have to recover from afterwards, something that has the flavour of watching the night sky at Grey Fox last year, or on the picnic table of the cabin in October, or walking through the art museum last birthday, or the walk I took by accident when there was almost rain and the sun was setting, or running through Pittsburgh at night with Dad trying to find a suitable place to eat before going to a concert sort of in a library, or watching Abigail Washburn & the Sparrow Quartet perform songs so strange and beautiful that my soul rose straight out of my body and fluttered birdlike over the amphitheatre.

(Maybe I should just say, Mum, Dad, can we just go driving around in the city for my birthday? And then we could come home and rent Once or something, and I could lie out on the roof and listen to something beautiful while the sun sets. Except, gas prices, reality, argh.)

And you can't create those incandescent moments; they come unbidden. I try to arrange them and they don't come; they're not like pigeons, you can't leave them crumbs and hope they'll come in flocks to collect them.

Furthermore it bothers me that I'm about to be eighteen, that I'm on the threshold of legal adulthood, and I haven't got much of anything to show for it. I don't like meeting people I haven't seen in a long, long time, because there is always the question, so, what have you been doing? And I have to fumble for things. What have I done in the past several years, besides little things? Sometimes the little things were lovely ones, but they were still little things, and I think, I'm the least grown-up person I know, and possibly the dullest. Other people go out and have adventures, or find adventures; I tell stories and make adventures out of the things that weren't. I haven't got a job and I haven't got any hobbies that get me out of the house, and even the hobbies I do have -- writing, photography, music -- I haven't exactly done much with. I think about going busking sometime, and then I think I'm too shy, and this city is too small anyway. I write a few words or a few sentences in the same story every two days or so. Sometimes I remember to take pictures of things. I don't work hard at it. I'm awkward in my own skin. I don't know whether I'm meant to grow into it, or take it in to fit.

And none of the people I am or pretend to be are the person I want to be, and they don't match up very well. I feel like a patchwork quilt sewn over another patchwork quilt with thick, black, awkward stitches.

Of course because I am too ritualistic I think that eighteen should be some sort of gateway, that I'll start solving my own puzzles and stop standing so crookedly and make something out of myself but things never turn out the way the patterns work. (Sometimes I wonder if there's an alternate universe in which I actually love mathematics, because all of the patterns and progressions and lists and arrangements don't mesh with me, haphazard and clumsy and messy and thoroughly literary, seeing and tasting in colours and emotion and intuition and photographs.)

Maybe I'll get a job, and finish a story, and find a college, and a major, and a purpose, and learn how to be excited again, how to love people, how to be optimistic. I don't know. I don't know.

So, here I am, being seventeen. (Does it feel any different? I'm not quite certain. I suppose one could maintain that it feels unusual due to the fact that I was up before six this morning!) I've had a glorious hour revelling in the quiet of early morning and the company of a cat (he came into the bathroom to wish me a happy birthday -- of course his chirruping mew could have just as easily meant "feed me!", but I'd like to think otherwise!) and a book and later some cinnamon toast.


And just now I logged in to check email and ressie_noldo instant-messaged me with this.

I AM GOBSMACKED YOU GUYS.

SERIOUSLY.

YOU ARE TOO MUCH AJHGSDLHGH. ♥ ♥ ♥

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

(and now I have to go and get dressed and go off and have my day and stuff.)

i. Am feeling quite good about things, all things considered -- at least I am now; I have been fluctuating. An hour ago I was feeling a bit grim for no particular reason. I have been remembering to take my supplements most days, which is probably helping a bit. (Possibly more than a bit.) And I'm finally getting a bid giddy with birthday anticipation, what with waking up in the morning and thinking "THREE MORE DAYS OMG". (Actually my first thought upon waking this morning was "SIRIUS/SARAH-JANE OTP!", but that's another story altogether.)


iii. Speaking of birthdays, I wrote birthday-fic for safebox, which I am still fairly in awe of. Not because I think it's a work of staggering genius (though I am very fond of it), but because of the dry spell which has been discussed here at some great length. I sort of forced it out of me, and it actually turned out good. I still keep rushing back to look at it and make sure it's still existing. You can read it here (An Anatomy of the Impossible) -- it's all about Martha Jones, hurrah!

Ahrm. Note the ticker. 

(Will resist 'squee!', as sixteen is a deeply dignified age, and I must practice for it. 

...Ha ha. Right.)

SQUEE!!11eleventyone!!1!

Am still working out what to do on it; most of the celebratory stuff will probably happen after the fact, as Dad will be deeply busy with Community Days here (sort of a fair-like thingummy the town holds every year). This is perfectly all right, as last year my birthday consisted of dancing about in the rain, listening to new music, wearing skirts, and the presents and whatnot; birthday party the next day (pizza, cake, and National Treasure with Sarah and Elizabeth), and Sunday (Father's Day) was spent AT THE BOOKSTORE with Dad. (And at Starbucks, which was in the bookstore, and Panera's, which was not.) Oddly, these three days are among my absolute happiest memories. This year, Mum and I are probably going to run about downtown, go to the used bookstore, and otherwise putter about in what will likely end up to be a shamefully feminine manner. (And which will not involve cars, at all. Cars are not a status symbol to me, and while I would really love to be able to drive soon, I do not need my license the first second I'm able, and going to take a painful driving lesson or twenty on my birthday would be misery. SHEER WOE AND MISERY. And potential death for anyone in the car with me, as I am Absentminded.) 

Well. Anyway. I should be writing. I really should. Because I found the last photo I need for The Wise and the Lovely, and I know you lot are just raring to see it and all, and I'm just being horrifically lazy by not getting the bedimmed book from upstairs and copying the speech. Someone save me from my own italics.

Also, um...oops. Entry-before-last, which I accidentally made Private instead of Friends Only, and wondered why I hadn't got any comments on it. All fixed.