I am forty-one years old. That sounds odd to me but it’s true. I spent so much time being afraid of thirty that I forgot to anticipate how to feel about the rest of my life. So, here I am forty-one and I feel pretty good about it.

Birthdays are arbitrary, aren’t they? It’s just a day but it’s a day that you choose to let people celebrate you. Who’s going to turn that down?

I woke up this morning and I went for a five mile run. The sky was blue and I ran through Prospect Park. I had a free Starbucks drink burning a hole in my iPhone so I ran with my phone and went straight to the Starbucks on 7th avenue and got my venti dark with a shot of espresso. (The venti is pictured in this post along with a bulb that I got for Christmas that has just started to bloom.)

Birthdays are about simple pleasures. Someone sends you a card and it brightens your day. What is a card? It’s a piece of paper with some signatures on it but it means so much.

That’s what birthdays are about. Here are some ways that people showed up for me for my birthday.

I got two boxes over the past few days. I got a box of books and some marzipan from my family. (Marzipan is a sugary almond based confectioners candy and perhaps one day I’ll explain why this is significant.)

Someone that I like made me a tofu scramble. She also made me a vegan birthday cake.

My oldest friends came into Brooklyn from the suburbs.

Some people that I coached in improv bought me a cake and a leather bound notebook. (And y’all know how I feel about notebooks.)

I had my storytelling show tonight and it went really well. A couple of my friends got me some homemade beef jerky, some lottery tickets, and a great card. And one of my storytelling friends paid me a huge compliment by telling me how much this blog means to him and it made my day.

Birthdays are arbitrary. It’s just a day but it’s a day that you choose to let people celebrate you. Who’s going to turn that down?