And Now We Are 34

Right, first things first, I give you the traditional dodgy cell-phone camera self-portrait, because no birthday is truly complete until my parents ring me and say “really, Peter, did you have to put that up on the internet?”:

Of course, this probably qualifies as an improvement on last years birthday photograph, but I’ve made up for that by wearing the-hated-hawaiian-shirt-I-tricked-my-mother-into-buying and eating-unhealthy-things-that-are-not-breakfast-foods-for-breakfast and being-mildly-hangover-dammit, which should make up for that in my parent’s eyes. On the other hand, this is the first time in three years I’m suffering no physical pain on my birthday (2009 – buggered up my shoudler; 2010 – root canal) which helps things considerably, and I’m not at the primary dayjob today, which removes the major source of emotional angst from my mental landscape.

To celebrate my birthday I will clean the flat, re- read Haruki Murakami’s Birthday Stories anthology, because it’s a damn good collection of fiction, then I will toddle off to teach a class on Historical fiction at the secondary dayjob and spend an ungodly amount of time sitting in rush-hour traffic trying to get home afterwards. If I am not complete exhausted after that, I will go play boardgames with some friends of mine.

If I *am* completely exhausted after that, I will drink scotch alone in my apartment and hate the world like the misanthropic hermit that I am 🙂

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Today’s also the inimitable Ben Francisco’s birthday, which is both awesome (’cause it’s nice to share a birthday with someone whose not only a friend but a smashing writer of speculative fiction) and sucks (because he’s over in New York being awesome and I’m stuck in Brisbane being, well, mildly grumpy and swearing at people about sit-coms).

And so, Happy Birthday, Ben. May you be doing something very cool to celebrate the day (and will please write some more stories so I can stop re-reading the ones you’ve published thus far).