shaking the moonlight out of my hair

good morning. once again, the courtyard is mayhem. which i am observing calmly and suppressing my inner cleaner*. the skies are blue and we even saw stars last night! it was a glorious evening. i am going to first reflect upon the lessons learned last night and then put on the dance playlist i made for the party and rock out as i clean up. i love gratuitous rocking out in unexpected contexts. which brings me to a lesson - 1: when i am walking around town rocking out with my ipod, wearing sunglasses and my pink 'princess' baseball cap, i am not invisible. sometimes i labour under this illusion and sing out loud or kind of dance along. people stare. it's weird, i know. but no weirder than the 70-year-old man i saw walking down wudaoying hutong yesterday wearing black pantyhouse under plaid boxer shorts, a white tank and green trainers, holding a canary. so i think it's ok. but really i should lose the 'princess' cap. it's a bit much. ok so other lessons:

2 - i should not wear dresses that are so short i can't raise my arms if i intend to dance. i actually learned this lesson after our last party. so i wisely chose not to wear my leo-fabulous shockingly short dress that i got for this birthday. (i literally can't sit down in it. but it's really hot. as i was getting ready last night i sagely decided that dancing aside, as hostess, i may be required to bend over or reach up at various points throughout the evening. so i went with another dress. this is the kind of deep intellectual thinking that all of my impressive degrees have enabled.)

3 - in a similar vein, i am slowly accepting that i may not be able to continue to wear shockingly short ensembs all that much longer. i thought about retiring my short shorts at 31 (i have quite a collection), but couldn't quite do it. this year the thought didn't even cross my mind. i intend to keep on rocking them (and, incidentally, rocking out in public behind the relative privacy of my sunglasses) as long as i can. it'll come to an end eventually. really it's just me v. gravity at this point. but i'm pretty stubborn and intend to give gravity a good run. i'm not giving up without a fight. actually, my fondness for hot pants was incorporated into a birthday roast two dear girlfriends wrote for my 30th bday. i will share it with you here. effing funny.

A Toast to Miss Mattie J Inspired by her own Facebook Updates

How do you begin to tell the story of a dear friend,
Who amuses not just you but herself to no end?

She lives a life of glamourous insanity,
While doing her best to help out humanity

Our dear friend Mattie is smart as a whip,
While ever the icon of her own brand of hip

Neither bustier nor hot pant will be left aside,
Should MJ have the chance to wear them with pride!

And with glee we have enjoyed many nights in the city,
Busting out the glam, it still makes me giddy

For sharing the sense that moderation is overrated,
Brought on many nights when we left the boys quite frustrated

On that score of late she has had us puzzling,
Over who exactly she's recently been nuzzling

We try to decode her various Facebook updates,
And we're watchful that she not involve herself with any ingrates

She said at one point that she blames the CIA
For what, we're not sure but here's to hoping they don't keep her at bay

She is so pretty and dangerous, you see
That it's perfectly reasonable they'd want to give her the third degree

She claimed at one point that she should really know better,
But living like that would be so boring, so fettered

Mattie, it is we who promise never to forsake the colours that you bring,
For you are ever a beacon of light and joy for us, with a dash of bling

And now as you enter your 30th year,
How lucky are we that the occasion has brought us near

Life without you would be terribly dull,
It's an existence I'd, frankly, rather not mull

I look forward to all of our birthdays to come,
And all of the living yet to be done

So on the occasion of Miss Mattie's glorious birthday,
Let us raise our glasses and shout out, hooray!


*************

Mattie updates lifted directly off Facebook for the purposes of this poem:

Mattie amuses herself no end.
Mattie is living a life of glamourous insanity.
Mattie blames the CIA.
Mattie is so pretty and dangerous.
Mattie will not forsake the colours that you bring.
Mattie really should know better.
Mattie thinks moderation is overrated.

ok so i was going to post that to poke fun at myself, but have ended up just missing my friends. who know and love me well. and vice versa. so maybe i'll skip all of the silly lessons i was going to list here. about booty-shaking** and then some, and get straight to the point. i feel so blessed this birthday. this life, really. for my amazing and beautiful family and friends. and that's all that matters. and for having come through fires, literal and otherwise, this year. i've survived. and thrived. which i could not have done without said amazing and beautiful family and friends. and for which i am so humbled and grateful. i also feel especially blessed this birthday because of some recent news. i sent a message to my pregnant sister on wednesday saying i wanted a niece for my birthday (i have two gorgeous wonderful nephews!), and she found out on friday she's having a girl. and now i'm literally weeping with joy just thinking about that. (ok and a little bit of sadness that i'm so far away. what am i doing here?!?) so that means it's time to close the computer, cry in a corner for a bit, than rock out as hard as i can while i clean up all the empty champagne bottles.



*who am i kidding? i am not really concerned with cleanliness, only aesthetics. i am very meticulous, for example, about the angles of my (gold) decorative throw pillows on my bed. and the placement of art and books and such. but i find no joy in scrubbing. none at all. my mother is a cleaner. one of my sisters may be as well. [query: is this an impulse that just comes with having children? will i give birth and then suddenly be that woman who jumps at the chance to chase dust kitties from the corners when there is a lull in conversation? even as i write it, i suspect not.] my mum can't sit still if there is anything unscrubbed within her line of sight. this is so much the case that all of my sisters and i have confessed that even in our adult lives we've been lazy about cleaning our flats and just waited for her to visit to tidy up. we justified this because even if we did clean in anticipation of her visit, she would walk in and immediately seize the windex anyway. in fact, it is entirely possible that the only times my bathroom was cleaned during my three years of law school were when my mum came over. (lest you think that i am jut as filthy filthy freaknasty gross as all the hiphop i've been listening to lately, i ought to clarify that i lived a 30 minute drive from my parents during law school, so visits were regular.) but there was another point to this footnote. oh yes, i do not have an inner cleaner, but once upon a lifetime i aspired to have one. thankfully, i am now old enough to simply be comfortably with who and why i am and no longer have ridiculous aspirations like that. i also have become neater as i age. when i was a teenager i was basically a slob. i distinctly remember sitting at our living room table in beijing, filling out an informational form for university designed to help with roommate placement and there was a question about cleanliness that asked you to select from a number of options to describe yourself. i read the options aloud to my family and opined that i tick "mostly neat with the occasional mess". they would have none of it. in fact my littlest sister may have spit up milk laughing at that suggestion. they insisted i tick the box that basically said "i am a completely hopeless mess and i can't recall the last time i saw the floor next to my bed because i live in a vacuum of misunderstood creative clutter that whirls about me at all times". ok so i added the creative clutter bit. clearly i'm still defensive. i think the choice actually said "very messy". it was the right choice. i'm not sure my freshman year roommate and i ever cleaned our floor. ever. and i think many small life forms perished in our fridge during the year. but we had a good time.

**once again i didn't dance with any straight men. or at least no eligible ones. oh well.