While paint dries

This has been quite the weekend.

I celebrated my birthday on Friday, which I started by picking up a gigantic bouquet of flowers from The Florist. It was spilling with lavendar and orange orchids, callas and two fragrant varieties of lillies and a dozen roses I had ordered because I so love the yellow veining in their dark burgundy leaves. Really beautiful. They were supposed to be a gift to myself, but The Florist gave me such a deep discount on the flowers that they essentially became a gift from someone else.

Friday night, HGM took me to dinner at a nice French bistro and surprised me by inviting some other friends. Sadly, one was wickedly sick and could not attend. (Get better soon, True Tomato. You sounded pretty nasty.) Dr. R, Bill Clinton, HGM and I enjoyed a very fine meal and went out for drinks afterward. Then, after Dr. R and BC hit the road, HGM and I returned to my neighborhood and went to a bar to chat for a couple hours. He's very engaging.

Saturday, I woke up and had a deliciously lazy laundry day that included a stop in to tell The Florist how much I liked and appreciated the bouquet. She ended up handing me one more flower for the arrangement, a pink mink. "I was looking for sexually suggestive flowers and found these, so I bought six," she said. "This one is yours."

A love of sexually suggestive flowers is something she and I share. This one certainly fits the bill, with the velvety dark fringe topping its soft pink tongue-like petals. When she handed it to me, I touched it with my fingers tenderly, then after feeling the softeness of it, put it to my face immediately. What a heavenly texture. All the better it should give just a bit more meaning to the term "tipping the velvet."

On Saturday evening, I met up with Rather Shy Classmate and King Rex -- and later, another classmate -- at a Scottish pub not too far from my place. We enjoyed a few drinks, some Scottish food and each other's company for several hours before I finally went home to crash.

This morning, I woke up feeling the last of the Guinness Stout in my tummy, took the dog for a walk and went to buy a birthday gift for someone else. Then, this afternoon, I had coffee with S2, and she gave me a gift sure to undermine The Clairvoyant's income from me: one of those massagers that kneads the nuts out of your back when you strap it to a chair. She reminded me of a day we went to the mall last year and sat in the chairs at Brookstone for a LONG time -- it was one of the hardest things I've ever done, leaving that chair .... The thing was kind of molesting me, if you know what I mean. Really very fun.

After I parted company with S2, I came home and made some decisions about completing -- finally -- a little art project that I've been working on for several months. I would add something to it and put it away. I made a decision a couple weeks ago to finish it before the end of my birthday weekend. Finishing it now is an intentionally symbolic act. I see completion of this piece as a way of telling the universe I'm done with a particular phase of my life, which the art represents.

Then, I went to a birthday party for one of my classmates, who I don't know very well but have socialized with a couple of times. She recently completed her internship at the same site where I'm interning now, so I ended up meeting and talking with some of the clinicians there. One of them was a bright-eyed, naive-looking mid-20s therapist who was drinking water and had an air of Mormonism. The other, one I sit next to in the office on Fridays, is a woman of about 28 with a Pat Benatar/goth/citified and professionalized pierced punk pastiche about her. Two totally different characters. I liked the one with the pierced tongue and the queer girlfriend better.

They introduced me to their friend, who described herself to me as a "feral" lesbian. She had a name that evoked Catholicism to me: Trinity. Trinity told me she hangs out on my street a lot and informed me that there are a lot of "hot, older lesbians" stalking my neck of the woods. I asked that should we run into one another on the street, she point some out to me.

Then, like a total dork, I showed her a photo of the pup that was in my cell phone and said, Everyone on the street knows me by my dog. Here's his photo so you'll recognize me when we meet on the street, where the light is so much different.(We were in a tiny bar lit exclusively by candles and an outside street light.)

After a while, I got tired from all the socializing and the drinking I've done in the past few days and headed home. Here, I did some of the final work to my piece. Right now, I'm just waiting for the paint to dry so I can add one last element and complete the piece.

I'll finish it before I sleep tonight. And then put everything, myself included, to rest.