Four. Oh?

It's my actual honest-to-goodness fortieth birthday today. But I'm going to save any philosophizing or musing or stock-taking or life-examining for later. I'm still rocking my birthday month, and the living is groovy. Pam the perfectly perfect party playmate took me for lunch and a pedicure today, and if I was any more relaxed I'd be ooze. I'm even too lazy to get my camera and show you the pictures of our smashingly Shrek-coloured toes (yeah, O.P.I, they of the wonderful reputedly-carcinogen-free and horribly-bad-punningly-named nail polish has a line out that goes with the new Shrek movie. Because nothing makes you want to run out and have your toes painted like a...Shrek movie? Whatever, shut up, my toes are awesome).

I know there are more important things going on in the world. I know there are more weightier issues to blog about (and no, I'm not referring to my forty-year-old ass). But I'm reminded of the time some of my high school friends had a party for my friend Sheila's birthday -- seventeenth, eighteenth, something like that. We were in someone's basement being giddy and frivolous and between movies about good-looking young people learning to salsa dance and dry-humping in dark corners, the news came on and there was something about the atrocity of the week and my friend Anne Marie said somewhat lugubriously "and here we are, drinking pop and eating chips". There was a loaded silence and then Sheila said "Shut up, it's my party". Go Sheila

So we had a party on Saturday, which sort of bothered my mathematical stickler of a husband because I wasn't technically forty yet, but next Saturday we have a piano recital and a couple of baseball playoff games. I tried not to get too excited about the party, because you know when you get really excited about A Big Party and then it's just a party? You know, a bunch of people can't come at the last minute, or things just don't come together right, or the conversation doesn't really gel, and then it's over and it just wasn't that great?

This was NOT that party.

It's not that anything momentous happened (althought I did play the piano out loud in public, because it was my fortieth birthday party and I thought I should attempt something unusual and a little scary, and this was the only thing I could think of that involved keeping my clothes on). It was just a good number of my favourite people in one of my favourite places, and there were purple martinis and silly jokes and immoderate laughter and I wore my purple dress and my hair went right and I felt hot. Examination of the photographic record shows that I was nothing approaching hot, but it was a good illusion and it was fun while it lasted. Also, I learned the important lesson that if you want to feel good about yourself, maybe don't keep posing beside your six-foot-tall statuesque blonde friend all night. Our neighbours came over, confirming my former conviction that we can never ever move. Although when I had to go over to my neighbours' house the next morning asking if my shoes were there, Paul didn't look like he loved me that much right then. Not because of my shoes, but because of the third of a bottle of scotch that went into him before I walked them home and kept drinking margaritas on the porch with his wife until 4 a.m.

It's funny how a night of food and drink, fairly superficial conversation, the odd in-depth discussion, and torturing Collette's husband with loud eighties music can sort of instill the sense that if these good people think you don't suck then you haven't actually screwed up everything for the last forty years. It's a little thing, but it's a nice thing. And only one or two glasses had to give their lives for this precious realization.

I'm sure I'll be back to my cranky cynical self soon enough. Right now? I just love you guys.