Birthday Wants 2019

It’s exactly one month until my birthday, and you know what that means: it’s time for the Birthday List.

1. I often move in ascending order from most reasonable to least reasonable, but this year I’m going straight for the kill: which is this Rachel Burke tinsel jacket. Magnificent! Irrational! Where the fuck would I ever wear this thing? This coat was born to party, and it would languish in my closet. But also, I feel like Jack Nicholson in As Good as It Gets: it makes me want to be a better person. Note that the ideal Marian version would be all silver, maybe with a few tufts of blue, but really who am I kidding? I’d take it in any colour.

2. Moving up and right, and back into the realm of sanity, what I really want the most, these days, is to spend as much time as I can in forests, by oceans, etc. I’m so sorry for this comparison, but doing so feels like finding the healing spring (or whatever) in a videogame: my hp starts to replenish. The persistent “down to one heart” beeping fades away.

3. As if to make up for the jacket, I’d like some nice, boring Converse shoes to replace my current worn-down set of nice, boring Converse shoes. Maybe high-tops, this time.

4. Here we get into classic Birthday List territory: what do I want for a breakky? I reserve the right to change my mind last-minute, but this new bakery, Livia, opened up right by my sister’s place, and they have the most amazing buttery, salty egg and toast soldiers.

5. And dinner! Even more appealing – my first idea is to replicate last year’s birthday dinner, which was incredible and consisted of an entire pizza followed by a bowl of pasta (followed by tiramisu). But that’s not how it works, of course, and I’ll have to find this year’s equivalent.

6. A shiny – it’s been so long since I last bought myself a shiny! My current student/artist budget doesn’t allow for hoard maintenance. But if I were to buy something, it would be a Moss Agate, half polished and half rough, like a little portable forest.

7. My current low-burning, long-running want is to collect a few nice pieces of silver jewellery. I’m liking Wolf Circus, which is a Vancouver-based brand. The idea of customising a blank tablet necklace appeals to me, but this lil snakey guy is perfect, and the plain rings, and so on.

8. My second, slightly higher-burning, long-running want is to get a couple tattoos. I’ve wanted a tattoo for years (decades?) but always hesitated to commit. What if I hated it five or ten years down the line? How could I control that? But lately I’ve grown more comfortable with the idea that there’s no controlling anything, really, so I’m willing to see how it goes. To start with, I’d like a simple band of blue around my right wrist, and then my grocery list on the left wrist. The latter is purely practical, because I always write my shopping list on my arm (scraps of paper get lost), and it contains the same boring stuff every time. Why not tattoo it, and add outliers to the bottom as needed? Common sense.

9. This is more of a general want than a birthday want, but I haven’t done much travelling throughout my twenties and thirties – not a fraction as much as I’d like. It’s a big motivator, right now: work hard, Marian, so you can travel places.

10. I can definitely travel to the pie store, though.