birthday.

The past few years I’ve been half-subconsciously trying to have my birthday on the run. Whether it is a pretentious effort, or simply a side-effect of not having bought a house to come home to (not even having been able to imagine being in possession of the amount of money to do so), whether it is because it’s easier to forget that I’m getting old amongst a handful of strangers, or simply that I thought I might feel better when no one – including myself – reminds me of my birthday; I don’t know.

What I know is this: in the few years that I’ve been half-subconsciously trying to have my birthday on the run, I always ended up telling one person, then two, then three and more people that it was my birthday. I view this as a sign of my shyness. No, not the telling, but the hiding. The telling, then, is merely the complementary other side of my personality. The bubbly one.

My recent birthday was spent in Jakarta. This time I was based, for three months, in Jogja. So Jakarta was countable as “on the run”, as much as the megapolis itself is also always on the run. No real party, but we were in a group of hundreds (note: hyperbolic level raises with age) with four of us having the same birthday. In the order of age, it is: myself, Ening, Jimget, and Audrey.

When I was trying to discern what makes the four of us similar other than the fact that we were born on the same date in different years, Ening told me that obviously she’s the most different. Yeah whatever grl. You’re the one with the big loophole earrings; you decide.

Audrey told us she had to fly between Denpasar and Jakarta with Singapore Airlines as a result of her government’s recent policy on traveling with Indonesian airline companies. That was also the reason Marie had to hire a car+driver to get from Jogja to Jakarta (I rode with her). We had stiff neck. Audrey must have watched a lot of movies instead.

Jimget was sitting too far away from me. He doesn’t look too different from the last time I saw him during Ruangrupa’s Jakarta 32ºC.

The resto gave me the worst Bloody Mary I’ve ever had. From now on, I will only order Bloody Maries when it is possible for me to stand close to the bartender and let them know how I like it.

Right at midnight Zeno called me, my lovely brother. My parents texted me and wished me best as always. I remember Zeno giving me presents – various things, that he made himself, that has since been either lost or being used together as a communal thing. Like, the wooden mailbox in the shape of a rabbit’s head (comical, of course) – I think the whole family just used it as a magazine box or something. Wonderful of him.

The day after I went to see some friends. Andrew, whose birthday’s coming; Orlow, whose birthdays he prefers to forget; Davy and Jane, my Sushi Tei buddies; then Dede, and Edwin … and the next day Diana with Edwin.

The day before my birthday, I also went to Sushi Tei with Rani, Prima, Joedith and Budi. But that’s a completely different story. Can’t get enough Sushi Tei.

Davy has been experimenting with lenses to trick our video camera to think that it’s more a film camera, and will be sending one for me, yippee! What he described was similar to what Tara has described to me, only with Davy I could touch the manufactured lens and tried it out on my camera. Such joy!

I helped Edwin and Dede making English subtitle for their new film, not finished of course because they still had to transcribe the Indonesian dialogue while I try to write. Diana was telling us about her four dogs.

Oh that. Yes. Everyone now has a dog. Or several. Mes56 has Gogol, a girl dog. Ruangrupa has Mentos, who looks like Snowy. Diana has Bobos, Kimi (both golden retrievers), Papal (pug), and Papas (boston terrier).

Like hyperbolicism, dogs also seem to come with age.

Except that last night, when I went to Mas Landung’s birthday dinner with Miranda and Putra, and met with all the older people who seemed to all know that when my mom was a student here in Jogja she once passed out in the church, I noticed there were no dogs. Mas Landung has four children, though, including two from his wife Mbak Ina.

So perhaps it’s either dogs or children that come with age. And, hyperbolicism. And birthdays, of course.