Birthdays have a funny way of messing with our minds.
They bring bouts of existential angst and make our otherwise perfectly reasonable selves act in seriously questionable ways. We spend the day oscillating between “It’s my birthday!” and “Nobody loves me”, eventually landing on “What am I doing with my life?”.
They polarise us on extreme ends of the celebration scale. Some of us want no mention of the “B” word at all, while others want all spotlights focused on them.
As it was my 33rd birthday this week, I indulged in bits of all the above-mentioned deliriums.
For starters, I couldn’t believe I was turning 33. It just seemed like a really big shoe that my tiny feet were not big enough to fit into. A couple of days into it, I still feel like a kid pretending to be all grown-up.
Then, I had a bit of a panic attack when I realised that my birthday was going to fall right in the middle of some of the lengthiest travel I had ever planned for myself: one week in Sri Lanka, two weeks in Hong Kong and one week in Islamabad. I didn’t want to spend my birthday all alone, away from all my friends and family.
But then I figured out that this was the perfect excuse to start the celebrations super-early. There were a lot of confused people at that party.
People: Happy birthday!
Me: It’s not my birthday yet.
People: Oh, when is your birthday?
Me: December 1
People: *silence* Then why are you celebrating it today?
Me: I just wanted to celebrate early
People: But it’s just November 10?!
Me: I wanted to celebrate really early …
They probably mumbled “weirdo” under their breath as they slowly backed away.
My actual birthday placed me in Hong Kong, and of course having already had a birthday celebration was no consolation when faced with the thought of not having 100 friends around me on the actual day. Uh oh. I could feel the birthday blues getting ready to sink their claws into me.
I swatted the blues away and decided to go with the flow … see what the day brought me when I didn’t plan it myself. And I was pleasantly surprised.
I ended up ringing in my 33rd birthday on a terrace overlooking the Hong Kong harbour, freezing my toes off, but warmed by a chorus of happy birthdays from people who I had not met before, but who were dear friends of one of my best friends, and therefore friends by extension. The party then moved to Hong Kong’s infamous Lan Kwai Fong district, where we were torn between three venues: a cosy pub with no food, a kebab place with no seats and a shisha place with neither food nor seats, but some pretty good-looking shisha.
So what did we do? We did a takeaway on the kebabs, seated ourselves in the pub and ordered in the shisha … because nobody wants to disappoint a birthday girl!
The cherry on the cake: someone, somewhere, overheard the birthday bit and the whole street swelled with the merry tunes of some of the cheesiest birthday songs played over the PA system.
The writer is an honest-to-goodness Desi fan living in Dubai
artslife@thenational.ae
A State of Passion
Directors: Carol Mansour and Muna Khalidi
Stars: Dr Ghassan Abu-Sittah
Rating: 4/5
Volvo ES90 Specs
Engine: Electric single motor (96kW), twin motor (106kW) and twin motor performance (106kW)
Power: 333hp, 449hp, 680hp
Torque: 480Nm, 670Nm, 870Nm
On sale: Later in 2025 or early 2026, depending on region
Price: Exact regional pricing TBA
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The specs
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Transmission: Eight-speed auto
Kerb weight: 1580kg
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On sale: via special order
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