The Birthday Man Cometh ....

It finally happened.

No, not death by travel-induced exhaustion.

I turned 40 today. I spent my traditional birthday weekend in New York with good friends. It was a great time, highlighted by my performing karaoke with a live band at 2:00 a.m. in a New York bar. Suffice it to say, it wasn't my best performance (in fact, I was terrible), but it was a lot of fun.

But that was this past weekend and today (Monday) is my actual birthday. So how did I celebrate my actual birthday? Well so far, I spent it on a plane sitting next to a very nice, elderly Austrian man on a flight from New York to Vienna (on my way back to Helsinki) watching "The Hitman" over and over, unable to fall asleep. Meanwhile, my new friend who looked at "Enchanted" more than once. I say "looked at" instead of "watched" because he never put on his headphones. He simply stared at the screen. Old people are funny like that.

I've been bracing myself for this day for a while. I'm not sure what I expected would happen -- would gray hair immediately sprout out of my head? Would liver spots appear overnight? Would I start to walk hunched over with a limp?

In actuality, I feel and look the same as I did yesterday. But it's somehow anti-climactic. My friends know that I hate being the center of attention, but for once I'd like to have some sort of party. I mean, I'm fucking 40 now. By all reasonable estimates, my life is half over. I secretly would really like a big dinner with friends on my actual birthday. Instead, today I'll soon be back in Helsinki, the land of the vowels. I'll probably have dinner with my new boss (who I really like a lot), who is also in town this week. It's not quite the birthday bash I dreamed of, but it's better than eating alone again in a restaurant filled with people named Teppo and Paivi.

I'm still wildly lucky to have great family and friends, so I'll stop my complaining and go back to trying to quench my endless thirst for caffeine. Who needs sleep when you can drink coffee instead?