23

Today is my birthday. I have tried to refrain from self-indulgent and overly contemplative musings on the meaning of life because no one really wants to read that stuff, but I do feel like birthdays tend to merit a little bit of reflection. I thought about requesting the day off to relax and reflect, but I kind of forgot, so I am reflecting at work. It is probably for the best though. Even if I had taken the day off, I probably would have slept in until about… 7:30, then taken the dog for a run, taken a shower, stared at the ocean and thought about life and love and God… and then it would have been about 9:15am and I wouldn’t have known what to do with myself for the rest of the day. (Although my 24 season 7 (!!!) is still untouched… coulda made quite the dent in Jack Bauer.) But anyway. Jack can wait.

I got to celebrate on Saturday night with a co-birthday party with another PCV in my area… basically, just any chance for us all to get together and have some fun. We had about fifteen people at our house for Mexican night, which included tortillas and chips (home-made of course), tacos, salsa, guacamole (somehow I found four avocados here, way out of season… expensive but well worth it) and velveeta cheese dip (to die for… how had I never heard of this stuff before Africa??). We also made margaritas with the Jose Cuervo and Triple Sec that I found in town, as well as sangria that consisted of a 5L bottle of red wine, a bottle of brandy, a lot of cheap fruit and some orange juice, mixed in one of the big buckets that I wash my clothes in… delicious. We also had a piñata (!!) and some guys with nasty mustaches, so all in all it was a success. We just hung out and went out dancing and it was a nice way to celebrate with people that I love. Slash I didn’t realize how much I would miss Mexican food when I no longer lived in LA and had chipotle, taco bell, buck fiddy´s, poquito mas, alberto´s and pink taco in a five-minute radius of me. Yummy.

There is a song by Jimmy Eat World called “23.” If you haven’t heard it you should listen to it—its good. Anyways, this song came out on their Futures album when I was 18 and was the soundtrack to my life for quite a long time. (I still consider it one of my favorite albums ever—like the Ataris’ So Long Astoria—for how much the album meant to me and my life at the time.) Anyway, this song followed me through a lot of rough spots a few years back and it is weird though, the sentiment of the song is aching and yet hopeful. And the bridge of the song—“Amazing still it seems, I'll be 23… I won't always love what I'll never have, I won't always live in my regrets…” is at one part depressing and melancholy but also, I think, in a weird way, hopeful—looking forward to the future and that hopefully things will eventually not be the way they currently are. I used to listen to this song and wonder where I would be at this point of my life. I probably wouldn’t have predicted the whole Mozambique thing, but that is part of the beauty of life and I couldn’t be happier about it.

Today marks a transition for me in many ways. First as a birthday. It is the first year ever that it pretty much doesn’t matter, to me or anyone else. It is really just a day. In college it’s a great excuse to party, but then again, what ISN´T in college? It is also the first time I am not excited to be turning another year older. Haha. There will be a lot of these to come, huh? How temporary is youth… kidding. But seriously, time flies! So this is my first birthday that is just me at work, not wanting to get older and not really caring either. But also, this upcoming year will be an interesting one. 22 was a good year, but pretty crazy—my last week at UCLA, my last three months of Los Angeles, a city that I often miss so much it hurts—and then moving to, you know, Africa! But then this year will be spent in Mozambique, completely. Here I am, six months into PCV life. And my next birthday, I will be six months away from going home, inshallah. A lot will happen and change and I hope I can live in the moment this year. I know I always say that—because I'm trying to remind myself, because it’s HARD. But I have “only” another year and a half here in Moz—and there is so much here to learn and discover. Here’s to 23, and all its charms and perils that are sure to come.