This is my last day of being the Diary of the Week!

So, I had a swell birthday, thanks!

No, I didn't see The Candyman, but I won't have you thinking badly of him. He started anti-depressants on Friday (which should be enough for the 80% of you out there either presently or formerly on them yourselves, but let me continue for the benefit of the other 20%) and was so absolutely loopy in his loopiness that he was completely incapable of making the two hour drive into city. Nor would he have been good company if I did manage to see him, as he couldn't keep track of the five minute conversation we were having on the phone.

Anyway, I left the house and the sky was grey and it started to slightly sprinkle, and I thought "Should I go back into the house and get an umbrella? Nah, it's not gonna rain on my birthday!" And it stopped! And turned into the most gorgeous day imaginable.

I swan, I make such a big deal about over my birthday it's as though I'm under the impression that no-one else has one. But it is the most exciting day of the year, even more so than Christmas.

So I got into the city and got myself some more presents.

On Friday I got myself the soundtrack to Rent which I've been wanting for ages but it takes alot for me to spend more than $30 for a record for heaven's sake! But it was a special occasion so I got it. And then yesterday I got myself a denim jumper at the Disney Store (yeah yeah yeah, it's got Winnie the Pooh on it, which I could have done without, but I really wanted a denim jumper!), and then I got a new journal with a furry purple and blue cover (No matter how little I write these days, I always write on my birthday and I forgot to bring my current journal with me) and a pop art purple plastic purse with flowers on (when John saw it he called it a Marcia Brady purse) to carry it in.

Then I went to the Morgan Library (a museum) to see the exhibition they have there on journals, which was absolutely fantastic.

There were journals from famous people and unknowns, children and adults, soldiers and spinsters. There was Sir Isaac Newton's diary from when he was thirteen, there was a journal that a husband and wife kept together, there was a case of journals from a whole family--mother, father and two kids. It was fascinating, and if anyone lives in the NY area the exhibition goes for another week.

My two favourites were complete opposites. One was written about the first battle of the American Revolution that had just happened the night before, and the best part about it was that it was so legible. Many of the other journals were written in foreign languages or code, or they're so faded or the handwriting is so poor that they couldn't be read directly off the page, you had to read the little plaque next to each one with the entry in question printed on it. But this one was clear as could be, and it was this incredible connection with this man who's been dead for 200 years, reading the exact page on which he wrote about something that's in history books.
God, that sounded lame, but it was incredible.

The other one was in the children's journal section. It wasn't really a journal so much as it was a handful of paper pulled out of a spiral bound notebook, and on one page was a drawing of a tree and a poem, and on another was a title page that said in this round childish printing that looked exactly like my printing from when I was a kid: Poems - by Sylvia Plath.
Something about that made me almost burst into tears.

Then at the gift shop, I bought these two great journals. Of course. Hand-tooled leather covers and stuff. I swear, I have enough unused journals to last until my fiftieth birthday.

I'm gonna have to start writing more.

So then I had lunch in Bryant Park and saw a girl who looked exactly but exactly like Tracing sitting with these two other girls, and if I had heard an English accent I would have gone over and embarrassed myself, but I didn't. Man, it looked like her, though.

Then I went to Radio City and met John and we saw Animal House and The Blues Brothers, which were great, of course. The audience for Animal House was kind of, well, obnoxious, especially the group behind us who kept making stupid comments, and then when the audience would do something as one like hiss Dean Wormer, one of them would say "Shut up!" Honestly, they were the last people to tell anyone to shut up. At one point, John turned to me and said "Boy these guys are funny! I wish they'd turn down the movie so that we could here them better! Maybe they have a comedy album that we could go buy!"

The Blues Brothers was a kick, too. They showed the trailer before almost every single other film, and whenever Carrie Fisher came onscreen some bright spark would always yell out "Princess Leia!!" as though the audience would rise up as one and shout "Good heavens! It IS her!!"

Then I went home and had my steak dinner and my birthday cake at three ayem and went to bed and now I'm officially thirty-three years old!

What's more pathetic, I wonder, putting candles in a birthday cake that you bought yourself and standing alone in your kitchen at three in the morning and singing Happy Birthday to yourself and making a wish and blowing them out, or the fact that I did all that and really had a good time?

One year ago today:
Now that's a mother that knows how to shop!

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