It's my birthday, though I'm not sure if I'm actually born yet. By which I do not mean enlightened, but rather, I can never remember if I was born at 3:56, or 6:53 a.m.

For my birthday I received a wonderful nighttime gift...A dream in which Colin Firth was my boyfriend. It was sort of like we were in a movie, but sort of not, because he didn't go by "Colin" in the dream, yet it was definitely him, and I even had to entertain the thought at one point, "wow, he could have any woman he wants, but he's selecting me!" There was also this whole other thread about somebody poisoning the teachers at school (It was set in a kind of parallel Bennington world), and for a moment I was suspected because everytime one of 'em went down, I was nearby, but then we figured out it was laced on the little school desks we were sitting in, and we all managed to wash our hands before Sven Birkerts died.

But then, in the waking world, I went to let the cat out and nearly was beheaded by some kind of dangling paper object. Upon flicking on the light, I discovered that my husband had strung a bunch of streamers from the living room ceiling, dusted the floor and couch with glittery balloon-shaped confetti and laid out my birthday presents.

Now HOW cool is that? He often gets up from insomnia so I thought nothing of it when, after another chapter of Harry Potter, he went to watch TV. Having barely slept the night before, and having taken melatonin, I crashed pretty hard. That's love I tell you. Staying up late to decorate the living room with confetti and streamers. There 'aint nothing else it could be, unless your spouse is an interior designer, I spose, which mine is not.

But let us move from buttoned-up, sexy Colin Firth and streamers (and my equally sexy and not quite so buttoned-up husband) to reflections on this, my thirty-first year:

Last year, I wrote this on my birthday in my journal:

"I feel myself at thirty with relief and surprise. I got here! How did I get here? I want this next one to be a decade of integration, of putting the unruly edges of threads under nicer seams, or snipping them. I can take the psychologist's approach and look at my writing as just a byproduct of a trouble upbringing--an adaptation to circumstances hard for me to navigate--or I can tackle it from a metaphysical point of view and say that this was given to me to navigate the world with, and navigate I have."

I think that is a good thing to have written. I am glad I wrote it and thought it. This year?
I am no longer under any illusion about whether or not I am an adult. I feel as responsible as I've often been put in the position to be without choice. I feel like I could be somebody's parent, or even guide. I heard someone say, when I was still in my twenties, "I hated my twenties because there was still all that grappling to know myself, and struggling. But by my thirties, those questions went away." And at the time I thought she was being simplistic, and a little disparaging of that important decade between 20 and 30, but now I see how right she was. I'll be honest that, while I have stuff to sort out at every age, I don't question who I am anymore, I don't want to apologize for it, and I'm glad that this life has led me to this place, this person that I am.

In this year I can't believe I have done all the following:

Stopped working for The Man
Started cooking
Planted a garden
Began jogging
Wrote and turned in a Master's Thesis
Wrote and delivered a Graduate Lecture
Graduated with a Master's Degree in Creative Writing! (Grandma would have been so proud!)
Finished a novel draft
Interviewed more than 20 authors
Nearly finished a draft of a non-fiction book
Began a meditation practice

Oh...it's too much to put down. Suffice it to say, it's been a momentous and ultimately wonderful year.

--Master 31