My birthday felt mostly like an ordinary day and I didn't think of it that much. I slept on Andrei's wood floor, which was a little difficult, so I was still a bit tired in the morning; I found it difficult to get up. Susan and I went over to a market pretty close to Andrei's place, where she loaded up on her usual diet - fruit and grains and some vegetables. I got some fruit, which was novel and very delicious smelling after being in Japan where you cannot easily get fruit. However, I opted to go over to a Subway close by for the rest of my food because $5 footlongs are a really good deal and comprise 2 meals for me.
We ate at the Subway, where I had my second encounter with our "unsolicited advice" problem. Now that I think of it the day before Susan and I had had what was to me a very weird altercation in which she was telling me about potential school plans, and I interpreted her to be judging them based on price. We were discussing various credit/payment schemes, and I tried to tell her that she might be able to go to a lot of places inexpensively if she chose ones that did 12+ as all the same price and then just took extra credits every semester to graduate early. I didn't realize while it was happening but sure enough Susan was suddenly very upset-seeming and annoyed that I had that. I guess I have never had someone react in such an intensely negative way to me trying to be helpful and it was very confusing. So at the time I just dropped it and Susan said she gets perhaps overly affected by people giving her unsolicited advice. I took note of this but I don't think I really understood the situation very well.
Anyways back at Subway I was thinking about how vegans, which I thought was Susan at the time but is in fact not, and I was like "you should really consider eating fish sometimes because it seems really healthy and likely to make you live longer" or something like that. Then I caught myself and said I realized that it was unsolicited advice and possibly apologized. She was silent for awhile. Then she ostracized me for various unhealthy things that I do and eat in the "you should consider not _____" form, which hurt my feelings. I don't think I ate anything other than fruits, vegetables, and stuff from markets around her ever again after that. I felt really upset about how she had handled that whole situation, as I felt that I was trying to express a positive suggestion that would be helpful with good intentions, and she responded by telling me that I shouldn't do anything I was doing at the time. I can recognize that it was probably irrelevant and stupid of me to make that suggestion in the first place. I guess having just watched Collin eat meat for a month influenced my thinking more than I realized. But I was really upset by her reaction and although I kept trying to get it out of my head and pass it off as just an unimportant incident, I couldn't. We walked silently to UC Berkeley and sat around there for awhile. Susan never talks unless it's absolutely necessary or she's high on caffeine, and I couldn't think of anything to say because I was trying to figure out how I felt about what happened and push it aside.
Eventually after Susan fell asleep under a tree at UC and I wandered around for awhile we were able to communicate again. We had some fun over at a huge It's Your Move style game store like so many couples I had watched come through my store on Pearl St. a year before. I am a lesbian unicorn, apparently.
We go and sit at a cafe where I do an LSAT practice thing and she goes and talks to her mom about unsolicited advice outside. When I'm done I reward myself with some thai iced tea. Susan comes back and brings up having talked about unsolicited advice with her mom, who also is not a fan. I don't want to talk about it. At first I think maybe it's all passed by now and start to enter the conversation, but then very quickly become conflict avoidant and try to shut down the conversation. I really don't want to talk about it because I feel like I don't understand where she's coming from and I would rather just totally avoid it ever coming up again. But it's too irresistible. So we talk about it some and she starts crying a little and I start tearing up, although I was unable to cry, and I felt kind of bad about the whole situation and realized how emotional of a subject this whole point is for her. She says it's good that we're crying together as a bonding experience. Things are kind of defused I guess. Actually I think it's over at this point but it will come back to rear its head again in the future. Chelsea calls Susan and they talk for awhile. I realize that I must not have my birthday on facebook.
I wasn't feeling too great about my birthday around this time. All I had really managed to do was do poorly on a practice test and make Susan cry, and then shortly after this clean at the house of some people I didn't know and feel like a random extra.
At this point I believe we walked over to the co-op where some friends Susan met at Burning Man, as well as at least one or two other Authentic World names, lived. The house is pretty large seeming; I didn't ever explore it really but I think like 15 people live there? Most of the people I met were gay guys who were pretty fun to talk to/be around. Or maybe they weren't? It doesn't really matter and I don't care at all what the orientation of the people I met was, but I am trying to be descriptive because this may be the only way I can remember anything about this in the future. There were chickens wandering around and one of the first people I met was Mike, a black dude wearing a bandanna with feathers coming down on either side of his head. Isn't this a unique place? Parked next to the house is Bass Bed, an art car that some of the people there helped build. It's a huge white van with a pink interior and a wooden frame with beds constructed around and on top. There are subwoofers beneath the mattresses on top of the bed. The idea is that you lay on top of it and play loud music and vibrate. So anyways Susan was here because she wanted to help clean out stuff that had been left at the house for burning man. I helped out as well because it feels weird to sit around while people are working around you. People at the house were really nice. It was kind of hard being "some guy." I met one of the Authentic World council members there - "T." He looked like a buff shirtless hippy (who shaves and has hygiene) with baggy pants that kind of reminded me of Aladdin's but more colorful. He and Susan shared a long hug and I felt jealousy. Stupidly, uncontrollably jealous. There are a lot of reasons why being jealous in this situation was stupid, not the least of which being that Susan is a lesbian, all of which I was aware of, but I still felt it and it was difficult to deal with. Anyways T is very nice and seems like a good guy.
After the cleaning T asked us if we wanted to go to a party they were having at some lake near there - they were taking Bass Bed. Why not? Now I have a birthday party. Strange how things work out when you're homeless and don't plan anything more than a day or two ahead, if that. So we pile into cars, and Susan, Mike and I into the back of Bass Bed (whose top speed is like 35 and you have to take on the flattest roads possible). We didn't really get there until it was almost dusk, and we didn't have lights, but we deployed the bed by a field. There were a fair number of us by the end, probably around a dozen or more. They played mostly dubstep and we danced and chatted and such. The moon was full and extremely bright, possibly a harvest moon. We had some light toys, including a sweet light-up hula-hoop. These girls of a family that was there that day, ranging from young to maybe a little older than me, all came over and tried out the hula-hoop and we clapped for them and that was all really cute and fun. I gave away a lot of Japanese cigarettes that night. While I was sitting on a curb a ways off by a trash can smoking a cigarette Susan came and sat next to me and actually seemed to want to talk some. It made me feel valuable and happy. I pointed out some constellations to her, or tried to but I don't know that many. After that I went over and talked to a Cuban guy named Joelle who had been away from home for over a decade in Italy, Mexico, and now America. He had a water bottle full of vodka, of which I partook while we talked for quite some time about traveling and feelings and such. After I did that for awhile I went and joined Susan on the bass bed for awhile, which was cold but nice. Eventually things were kind of winding down and we were a bit past curfew, so we decided to call it a night and pack things up. This was convenient because right when we finished packing a lot of the stuff up the cops rolled up. And 2 people had lost the keys to the vehicles. So someone was like "oh your headlights are actually really useful" and we told the dude we were looking for our keys, which thankfully we found before he decided to give us curfew tickets.
Back at the co-op we sat around at a table and drank tea and a couple of guys made fried tempei which was amazing. Then Susan and I got blankets and pillows and slept on top of Bass Bed outside. It was a little cold but not that bad. I noticed when I woke up once at night that everything seemed to be covered in water, which kind of freaked me out. But I didn't wake up soaked. Maybe damp? Who knows.
So that was my most unique birthday ever.
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