Hitching a Ride into Club 33 – At Sea – [10-05-2015]

I keep my birthdays quiet on ships. I always have. I don’t like to see my name and ID photo splashed across the bulletin screens with the prompt to send me best wishes; I don’t tell the ‘Cats singer for fear that she’ll announce it over the mic at the set, and I always tell the team not to throw me a party. This particular team might fight me on that, I’m not sure…I can never quite tell whether or not my coworkers are serious…

But I’m just not a party person.

So instead the culinary host commissioned a small (and extremely yummy) chocolate birthday cake for me, and Amras and I had dinner at the Italian restaurant onboard. Nice and quiet.

As I’ve gotten older, birthdays have become more intimate occasions than public ones. My friends on the team know, the barista at my office coffee shop knows (so she can give me free coffee…plus, I do consider her a friend), my boss knows, and obviously Amras knows, though he pretends to forget – or to purposely try and put my birthday on the wrong day.

This birthday feels a little…surreal. For one thing I’m celebrating it in the middle of the sea – literally – we’re just over halfway through our trans-pacific crossing. It’s always a bit of an odd experience; I suspect it always will be.

32 was a good year, I was quite content to be 32. I suspect I will be quite content to be 33 – except I’m not 33, I’m 29 with a couple of years interest 😉 Seriously though, 32 was good to me, confusing but good. Every year is its own emotional rollercoaster, and I have come to realize over time that it’s really just what you make of it.

Its’ true that I’m not…perhaps…where I thought I would be at 33. I don’t think anyone ever is. I look back now at the person I thought I would become and realize I’m not even remotely sure whether I would have been pleased with that outcome. It doesn’t matter really, because I ended up somewhere else. As so many of us do.

After all, you just never know where those train tracks are going to take you; and birthdays are odd things – they don’t really matter all that much, they’re just a signpost along the side of the tracks, a way of remembering where you’ve been and how long you’ve been there.