No one wants to pay $80 to attend your 10-person birthday dinner at that small plates restaurant.  No one.

Everyone on Facebook knows it’s your birthday. If they don’t write “Happy birthday you gorgeous minx” on your wall, it means they looked at your birthday alert and thought “eh, fuck it.”  Hold a muted grudge about this forever.

If you tell people you just want to sit at home on your birthday they’ll think you’re an asshole, and they will be right.

No one is throwing you a surprise party.

If someone wants to give you a Kindle, the right answer is never, “I already have an iPad.”  Gifts are to be received in the spirit in which they are given: a generous one.

If you meticulously plan your birthday party it will suck. If you don’t meticulously plan your birthday party it will suck.  Or the opposite could be true for both.  It’s like New Years, you just don’t know! Actually, it’s like life. If you think of your birthday as a metaphor for life it can be really fun. Or it could suck.

Don’t be turning 25 and complaining about getting old. You are lucky to have made it this far, and probably won’t live to be 80. Enjoy yourself.

Don’t get mad if people can’t come to your birthday party because they’re going on vacation, or have a funeral or whatever.  The only reason to get mad is if they’re skipping your party to go to their asshole ex boyfriend’s party in the hopes of getting laid, but even then you should be able to kind of understand their reasoning.

No one’s going to give a toast.

Unusual natural disasters in the week leading up to your birthday probably have nothing to do with you.  Don’t say things like, “Why did this have to happen in my birthday week?”

There is no such thing as a birthday week.  Your birthday is one 24-hour period per year. It is not seven 24-hour periods, or even three. Unless your mom was in labor for a week, in which case someone should be throwing her a party.

It’s okay if people who aren’t on Facebook don’t remember your birthday.  It doesn’t mean they don’t like you.  If they don’t like you, you probably didn’t need the absence of a birthday message to tell you that.

Call your friends on their birthdays. Even if they don’t pick up.  Them not picking up is the point. It’s their birthday.

Don’t go home at midnight on your best friend’s birthday. It’s one goddamn night. All these other bastards are probably going to leave her anyway. The best bonding happens at 2am on a Wednesday. You can stay awake.

Your birthday should feel like being three glasses of champagne in at your book party.  In other words you are happy, generous, delighted by everything, and lit from within by your own accomplishment (for help see any picture of Kate Moss.)  No, turning 25 is not a huge feat when it basically involves waking up in the morning for 25 years, but at least you woke up!  When society hands you an opportunity for the frivolous celebration of yourself you should always take it.  It might be a whole year before that offer comes around again.

S and I were on the train headed back from somewhere.  It was crowded with after work people headed home.  We stood in the middle, our hands on the pole with a bunch of other people, shorter or taller than us.  Height being the important measurement on the subway since it dictates where you get to put your hands.  S was reading a book of stories edited by the British writer Zadie Smith.  A middle-aged man (short) with glasses who was part of our pole-group studied S’s book and asked, “Have you read her first one?”  He couldn’t remember the title, and the three of us stood there trying to remember it, when a young British man (chap?) announced from on high (tall), “White Teeth.”  The matter seemed resolved, as well as the unasked question of whether everyone in our pole-group liked Zadie Smith.  They did.  I guess we all get the pole-group we deserve.

But then the middle-aged man said, in reference to the book, “I finished it moments before the first plane hit the towers.” S remarked that this was quite a memory and that she hadn’t realized the book had been out that long, almost ten years but whose counting?  I watched the conversation feeling like an anthropologist, which is to say a little left out. So this is how they slip their war stories in.

You’ll hear stuff like this all over New York.  After the earthquake it was the only way they could get the West Coast to shut-up, “We thought it was another 9/11.”  There is no West Coast response to that but embarrassment tinged with shameful jealousy, which increases the embarrassment until we change the subject.  West Coasters I think realize that comparing our experience of 9/11 to the experiences of those in New York is like comparing flying in a plane to jumping out of one.  Which is to say it feels strange to be here now, days before the anniversary.

My memory of it is limited and common.   I was 14 and getting ready for school.  My mom got a call and turned on the TV.  The thought was that it was an aviation mistake.  I straightened my hair.  My ride arrived.  I went to school.  There was some strangeness.  The TVs were on.  There seemed to be a lot of aimless wandering in the courtyard.  The main topic of conversation was a rumor that L.A. would be next.  Imagine having lost the ability to make fun of Los Angeles.  That would have been a real fucking tragedy.  Yes, that was 9/11 related sarcasm, but I’m from an island in the Puget Sound so I hope you will forgive me.  I know basically nothing, and not even reading last week’s memorial editions of The New Yorker and New York Magazine has made my feelings about it any more visceral.  It seems to have nothing to do with me, and yet here I am.

We end up in the backyard of a great bar down the street.  It always ends up being 3 of my friends and 16 of someone else’s friends, but I had said I didn’t care what we did for my birthday and now I have to mean it.  The truth was I was having a nice time.  Most of us ended up back at the usual bar, where we danced and drank cheap beer and looked for signs of the hurricane.  There were no signs, except for us looking for signs.

The next day S and I went to the grocery store to stock up on food and look for signs of the hurricane. We had heard rumors of checkout lines reaching around the corner, but when we got there it was no more than the usual Saturday afternoon crowd and the only part of the store that was sold out was the bread aisle.  We started buying all the stuff we don’t usually buy – cookies, ice-cream, etc. – before realizing that the whole point of this was non-perishable food, not just end of the world food, i.e. what you would eat if you’d seen your last bikini season.

We went home, took showers, and pulled the pictures down off the wall.  We closed all the windows, but then opened them, because it was too hot.  S stared filling things with water and putting them in the freezer.  She tried to explain that this was because if the power was out and the windows were closed we would get really hot.  I wasn’t sure how a Tupperware full of ice would help with that, unless she was suggesting an ice bath.  I nodded like I was ready for an ice-bath.

L invited me over for food and Bananagrams, and I went since nothing seemed to be going on yet, except for a light rain and general aura of doom.  When I got there, we went up on the roof to survey the scene.  It was 7pm and starting to get dark.  The air was heavy with humidity, and the rain was moderate.  There was no wind, and the city was hidden by low whispy clouds.  It basically looked like a bad hair day.

After an hour I took off, worried I wouldn’t be able to get home later.  The streets were mostly empty and businesses were closed.  With the umbrella it was a nice night for a walk.  I’m always pleasantly surprised by umbrellas.  Above your knees they work great.  It started to rain harder as I approached home, passing an evacuation center on my way where the volunteers were gathered in the doorway watching the sky. A lone police car went by lights on, sirens silenced, which always makes me feel like I’m in the climax of a movie, where the actual sound has been replaced by music. Except there was no music.  Just the rain and a light wind in the trees.

Woke up this morning to my twitter feed warning me about a tornado in Brooklyn.  I wanted to get more information, but didn’t know where to find it.  There’s was nothing about it the Times, just a long article about storms getting worse as the planet warms.

You might think that, as people who are used to extreme weather, New Yorkers would continue life as normal when it rains, but you would be wrong.  They refuse to go places, do things, or generally leave their houses, partly because cabs don’t appear to work in the rain.  I heard a story from a girl who, needing to get to her boyfriend’s birthday party one rainy Friday night, actually walked into a restaurant and begged patrons and employees alike to “try any cab service they could.” The delivery driver ended up taking her from Brooklyn to Manhattan.  She normally would never get into a car with a stranger, who was not a certified stranger (read: cabdriver), on a rainy (read: killing) night.  But the rain drove her to it, and she was also literally driven to it (in the car, across the bridge, by a delivery man) because of the rain.

Everyone here has umbrellas.  I’m starting to realize that in fact everyone everywhere has umbrellas except in the one place you might think they would – Seattle. My friend, who grew up with me near Seattle, recently watched me take an umbrella out of my bag in a downpour and asked, “Where are you from?” so disdainfully that I felt embarrassed and almost wanted to take it down, but it was already inflated, and also it was raining, hard.

That was really a case of the exception proves the rule, because normally I never have an umbrella to open up and feel embarrassed about.  Being from Seattle, it’s just not in my nature.  But I’ve come to realize that that’s because it doesn’t actually rain in Seattle.  It drizzles, mists, and sprinkles, and the sky is oppressively gray 85% of the year, but it doesn’t Rain.  In New York it Rains.  It pours, monsoons and floods.  You would not be remiss to use the word “deluge.” And you should use it, and often.  It’s the kind of thing where when you don’t have an umbrella, a stranger will offer to share theirs, because they’re worried you might drown in the sky water and also in your own self-pity.

But rain is fun in New York in a way it’s not fun in Seattle, because at least in the summer it’s warm, and there’s the possibility of lightening during the day. It’s fun because everyone is united by the falling water, and the possibility of staying inside, and the chance to look up into the sky and have your day be defined by what’s happening there.

Witness by Kay Ryan

Never trust a witness.
By the time a thing is
noticed, it has happened.
Some magician’s redirected
our attention to the rabbit.
The best life is suspected,
not examined.
And never trust reverse.
The mourners of the dead
count backward from the date
of the event, rehearsing
its approach, investing
final words with greatest weight,
as though weight ever
carried what we meant;
as though he could have
told us where he went.

Me In Paradise by Brenda Shaughnessy

Oh, to be ready for it, unfucked, ever-fucked.

To have only one critical eye that never

divides a flaw from its lesson.

To play without shame. To be a woman
who feels only the pleasure of being used
and who reanimates the user's

anguished release in a land
for the future to relish, to buy
new tights for, to parade in fishboats.

To scare up hope without fear of hope,
not holding the hole, I will catch
the superbullet in my throat

and feel its astounding force
with admiration. Absorbing its kind
of glory. I must be someone

with very short arms to have lost you,
to be checking the windows
of the pawnshop renting space in my head,

which pounds with all the clarity
of a policeman on my southernmost door.
To wish and not jinx it: to wish

and not fish for it: to wish and forget it.
To ratchet myself up with hot liquid
and find a true surprise.

Prowling the living room for the lightning,
just one more shock,
to bring my slow purity back.

To miss you without being so damn cold
all the time. To hold you without dying otherwise.
To die without losing death as an alternative.

To explode with flesh, without collapse.
To feel sick in my skeleton, in all the serious
confetti of my cells, and know why.

Loving you has made me so scandalously
beautiful. To give myself to everyone but you.
To luck out of you. To make any other mistake.

While riding a bike in New York City, there’s no moment that you stop waiting to die.  It’s just there, all the time, the death or some iteration of it involving your neck and the grill of a bus.  L and I had taken our bikes across the Manhattan Bridge into Chinatown for cold sesame noodles at a place fittingly named Excellent Dumpling House.

After lunch, we rode to a park off the Westside Highway and read.  Well, she read.  I was trying to read on an iPad outside, which meant I spent most of the time trying to throw a shadow across the screen so I could see what I was looking at.  After this, it was time for L to go to work and for me to go home.  She said she’d take me to the Williamsburg Bridge and make sure I got on it okay.  I didn’t really think through what this meant.  She wasn’t coming with me.

Suddenly, as we were about to ride through a crosswalk, she said “there’s the bridge” and stopped on the corner with that look on her face that says “my job here is done.”  I didn’t understand what was happening.  We don’t stop at green lights.  That’s when we go.  Then it dawned.  This was it.  She wasn’t coming.  I was on my own little birdie, fly, fly, flyaway home.  I was already half-way across the street saying something like, “You come with me?!”  But she just shook her head and yelled “Turn left!” And so I turned left and joined the four lanes of cars headed toward the bridge.  It was 4 in the afternoon and nearing 100 degrees.  I was utterly alone.

I am definitely going to die.  The cars zoom past and my stupid goddamn flip-flops, that I should never have worn, slip around on my feet like slimy fish. But then something happens. I do not die. I make it through three stoplights, and I do not die.  I get on the Williamsburg Bridge bike path that rises like the stairway to heaven above the cars and the trains.  I’m doing it.  I am definitely not even going to die, especially since now the cars have been confined to their own little driving area.  Which I’ve realized is where cars should always be: in their own playpen, separated from me by steel girders.

The city falls away behind me as I ascend toward the blue sky.  I still can’t do that standup and peddle thing the girl in front of me is doing, and my arms are tattoo free, like baby arms, and it feels like I might not walk right again, but I am goddamn doing it.  I am bicyclist. As I sail down the other side of the bridge into Brooklyn and towards home I don’t even use my brakes.