Birthday Wishes

I would spend two whole days calling and texting people asking them to come party with me (and on a few occasions come dressed up in a specific theme). My job wouldn’t stop there though. I had flyer designs to deal with, email blasts to send, oompa loompa’s to coordinate and worst of all I would have to be out the entire week leading up to it promoting. While I was supposed to be partying my thoughts were really consumed with who was going to be late for dinner, how many people would come, is the door running smoothly, would I get a spender buying bottles so it didn’t become a free for all at my table. It would propel any marginal amount of social anxiety into hyperdrive. Without fail my favorite part of any birthday celebration was when it got late enough for me to throw a smoke screen and Houdini it out the back door.

This birthday was the first time in about 10 years that I had the freedom to do whatever the hell I wanted (or didn’t want) to do. For the past 2 weeks I’ve been hanging with my man Max from the UK. He is currently living in Qatar, had to go back to work and was the only person that knew it was my birthday. This gave me the revelation of having a rare opportunity to go through an entire birthday without talking about it. The ability to tell nobody is sort of a symbol of independence. Like when Andy Dufrense had the Shawshank guards buy beer for the inmates just so he could refuse to partake because he quit drinking. He did it to feel like a free man again.

I met a group of locals from my hotel that wanted to hang out. It was 6 Vietnamese guys, 2 Vietnamese girls and me. We started out playing cards in the hotel room, followed by chilling out on the dock of Cat Ba island in Halong Bay. They brought along water bottles filled with some home brew honey liqueur and a guitar. We sat on the ground drinking the sweet moonshine, with the consistency of Jäger, while they passed around the guitar and sang along to the native jams that sounded like a Vietnamese version of classic rock. I sat back with a smile, tapping my foot and bobbing my head. From there we went to a bar where the drink of choice became Jose Cuervo Gold (not my idea). It ended up being a long long night, but it should have been, we were celebrating… it was Saturday. My dirty little secret made it through the night undiscovered.

Bob