Birthday eve

200214.2324

Birthday eve

What an honour (in a wei...) to be asked for ID on the eve of my thirtieth birthday! Sat down at a Japanese restaurant I found on urbanspoon, and saw it was almost the end of happy hour, sake for only $2! I showed the waitress, a lovely middle aged Japanese lady, my ID and said I'm turning thirty tomorrow. She laughed and after dinner brought  me a bowl of green tea ice cream with a cherry on top.

I wandered around streets of San Jose after dinner. It's a quaint small city, with a large Mexican and Japanese population. In the heart of silicon valley, it is naturally relatively new and  extremely wealthy and has a very well connected public transport network. 

I walked around, and began to feel a bit lonely. My coughing is still there, and I feel  this bad pain in my head (which, as the evening progressed, got worse and made me dizzy...). A homeless man, probably not much older than me greeted me, and asked for a quarter. I apologised, and walked by slowly, noticing that he had a rugsack of his belongings and cage with what I believe is a cat inside. He wished me goodnight. I really wanted to turn around and get him some food, or offer him something, but I did not...

I walked past a cinema, and was interested seeing something light to cheer me up (ie distract me from my own thoughts...) Just so happens the Lego Movie was about to start soon, so I went in and made myself comfortable.

It's a surprisingly good and lighthearted movie, just what I needed and wanted, and made entirely out of Lego bricks. I grew up playing Legos, and my very first one was a set of a small fort in the ocean, which came with three men. It later expanded to a robin hood castle, and various other items that made my collection grow. There was a phase of several years I was obsessed with building tall things, like a tower. I would build something as high as possible, and have different levels with landing ports for my small collection of plastic  planes and helicopters to land on. It was such an age of creativity and sense of achievement (except when the tower came tumbling down!). Something about the permanent smile on the Lego figurines has always been so endearing. I even had four figurines who I nomainated to be members of my family. They would ride around in my model trains or in the planes that I would try to build (this was another phase of my teenage years, building planes or at least machines that could fly...) The fact that these figurines were always together, always happy looking and always smiling was a contrast to reality of my family and what I wanted my family to be...

And the Lego movie emphasised this very aspect of creativity and joy to be had with existing blocks and collections. Anyone can be a "master builder", anyone can create new things and innovate and live out their fantasies. What a way to relive memories on the last day of my second decade on this world.