Birthdays

It's been quite a few days since I've written...although I didn't make it back here to wish Craig an actual Happy Birthday on the 18th, I think he fairly well gathered that the wishes were gushing from me given that I bought him 3 distinct greeting cards, leaving one as a surprise on his dash, awww. That happened to be the one with the guy with the rippling abs on the front, the inside paralleling having a 6-pack versus drinking a 6-pack, a card which I thought was really hilarious...however, the photo of the greasy muscled male bod alarmed more than amused him. Anyway, we delighted in a most normal birthday celebration, one unlike any we've spent with each other before, for instance there were no expensive flights involved, there were no groups of friends force-feeding him shots: it was just a quiet night in. I made stir-fry upon his request but must have drowned it in the Szechuan sauce because as Craig and I sat across the candle-lit dinner table from each other fumbling the food with our chop sticks, we breathed gradually-increasing spicy fire at each other. I definitely overdid it on the sauce. And this was after poor Craig came home from work reeking of lethal amounts of garlic, too, still potent hours later from a birthday lunch with a co-worker. Anyway, after dinner we polished off the birthday wine, settled into the couch to watch Nicole Kidman's new thriller The Interpreter, but must have just been entirely too exhausted compounded by the fact that we're getting old, because we didn't so much as begin the thing before we were both fast asleep. Well, I think I didn't make it beyond the couch--he didn't make it much longer than that, either. It was just so perfect to have his birthday with him without the flooding dread of having to leave him.*Speaking of The Interpreter, we did wind up watching it in pieces through the remainder of last week. Here I admit guilt-free to being inexplicably annoyed with Nicole's breathy seductive accented whisper. At first I was totally into the film--it's definitely intriguing, intelligent, and Sean Penn amazes me in this I'm type-cast into every role I play but I'm really good at playing that guy kind of way...while it may not be necessarily difficult for him to play that strained, over-worked and underpaid middle-aged weathered sex symbol who has suffered a loss of someone he loved, he continues to impress me (it's not like his character in The Interpreter differed so greatly from his role in Mystic River, but both satisfied my expectations of him). But Nicole and that voice, the way she delivered her monologues with carefully pieced strands of blonde hair wanting to seem messy framing her pointy face, the sound of that overly sensual hushed rasp filling too many moments of the film really turned me off. In fact, the night we finished it I fell asleep, and never bothered to find out the film's actual conclusion. Craig loved it, of course. Which is fine...often I am reminded that our differences are what match us so well.*Batman Begins, however, stunned me in its infinite excitable and dramatic wonder! We watched that yesterday morning after coffee and eggs and were really pleased.*Although I am buying Craig a digital camera for his birthday, a joint gift we have needed in our household for months now and have neglected to purchase, I also ordered for him the above image in poster format from Snapfish. Here I praise the service of Snapfish...its ease, its convenience, its excellent print quality. I positively adore the service. The poster turned out perfectly (well, considering our actual image isn't the best--it was overcast in Brooklyn that afternoon, resulting in an overcast shot of the bridge...) The poster will still be nice framed.*Friday Craig flew to Scottsdale for a business meeting so AB came to Smyrna for "girls' night". She brought over two Southern Living dips, one tomato paste-based (say that 5 times fast)that was my favorite, and another with fresh dill. She pulled out her bag of vegetables and I watched her arranging raw asparagus on the tray. This seemed strange: Do we need to steam that or anything? I asked stupidly, and she defended, No, they showed this in the photo of the recipe! Made enough sense when she said so, so later, after wine and conversation with one of my impeccable iMixes rolling in the background (yes, I am arrogant when it comes to my ability to make music mixes) we broke out the appetizers--her dips, my taco one, nacho chips, French bread, and the vegetables, and I shrugged off my inhibitions and bit right into a raw asparagus spear. It...was...awesome. Again with my inability to express myself, I say in all seriousness that I was completely grooving on the raw asparagus. It finally became comedic, even, how I could not stop bumbling over it. Anyway, AB and I had a wonderful time, all Friday and well into Saturday, the latter which found us sprawled on separate couches moaning and holding our heads. Or, at times, falling off the couches laughing at one another for the fact that we are just so damn funny. I rank her really highly in the wit and charm category. Between her and my girlfriend JZ from college, and my friend ST from Detroit, I bet the 4 of us have more than our share of women beat for being so funny. I'm lucky to be alive in it.*Finally, to conclude this segment, I proudly announce I have thrown myself into the vast number of individuals participating in this year's National Novel Writing Month. I have made feeble attempts to download the "icon" to this page, but my knowledge is so limited when it comes to these things. No matter, that is irrelevant to this: beginning November 1st I will launch myself into the project headlong, quite probably creating a 50K word piece of garbage and discontent, if I manage to make it that far along by the end of the month. But the website is right: if you participate, at least you have a deadline to meet, versus the unending sometimes forefront more often latent desire to "someday produce". We'll see what excitement ensues with the beginning of next month. I even went so far as to order a t-shirt.