First a fast message to my blog believers. The China site is down but I have all the blogs saved and will make a new site for those soon. Soonish. If anyone wants them in the meantime I am around. The blog tech has got so easy even a numpty like me can use it so the same site from back in 06 doesn't make sense any more. I will make a new one soon. I also gotta mail something to my dad, can you guys remind me to do that? I keep forgetting.
Thanks for the happy birthday wishes on all the various media hoosie whatsus thing ama hey heys that we are into. It was nice to hear from everyone and I will try to get back to all of you over the next couple of days, even if only a fast sentence about how much you mean to me or to attempt a catch up. But thanks, I feel loved and that is a pretty good thing. You lovie dovies
So it happens, well if we are all lucky (Inshallah) it happens. We go and turn 37. One minute you are reading comics in math class in high school, then you look around and you are in college, then the twenties goes by in a blur and whamo here comes 37. And with any luck 38 will come right behind it (Inshallah).
Aging is part of things and we can embrace it or ignore it or fight it or hate or celebrate. I am neither old nor young. I am somewhere in between. I find hangovers are worse than they used to be. I find little grey hairs in my beard that were once brown. But I am far from old.
My grandmother had me by 60 years. When I was 17 she told me that she had had her time to be 17 and it was wonderful. but now it was her time to be 77 and that was just as nice. So now it's my time to be 37 and I am pretty happy about it. I am in Hong Kong, I make pretty good money for the first time in my life, I live on a small island that is wonderful, I teach which is something I dig, and the food here is holy cow amazing. I think if the 17 year old me saw me now he'd be as happy as I am. Life is good (Hamdula).
I got to thinking back on the past few birthdays I have had. They were pretty good ens (Hamdula) so I thought maybe I'd tell you guys about them. If you think that sounds boring than go screw, who needs you? Jerk. If you think that is cool (Inshallah) than Hamdullah.
I guess I was in my early 20s in the early part of this century. We used to always hang out at a bar called Trackside in Decatur which was where I used to have all my friends show up to get me drunk on the occasion of my birthday. I hadn't the foggiest idea of how to drink then and would just gun drinks until I was in need of medical intervention. One year I got up to sing something at the karaoke that was hosted by this metal head guy, I can't remember much about. He said I could have a shot on his tab when I finished singing. Later in the evening he found me barely able to articulate language and demanded to know how many drinks I had put on his tab. None, they were all from dear friends who all felt the best way to prove their loyalty and friendship would be to replace my blood with Pabst Blue Ribbon and whiskey shots in willy nilly order and maybe a little gin thrown in, maybe just a dash of god knows what else.
I was there with my room mate Ryan who had been talking nonstop about a girl he met, he had brought her to the party that night. Everyone was having a good time and pretty soon I was dead asleep.
I don't remember what happened next.
After a solid week of not speaking to me Ryan finally told me the story. I had fallen asleep holding a poster tube containing a poster for the film Blade Runner that someone had given me. Ryan was in mid-asking this young lady out after finally gathering the courage. Suddenly a very passed out guy on the other side of the table woke up and smacked the young lady in the head with a poster tube and explained that the skin head at the other end of the bar was someone he knew in Boy scouts when he was a kid and that the skin head was a total dick. The skin head, I can only assume and luckily I would add didn't hear any of this. Then this drunk asshole passes right back out and doesn't understand why his room mate is giving the cold shoulder for the rest of the week.
I am embarrassed to tell that story, it was a younger and drunker me, and I still have no memory of it happening except in my mind I can see a very shocked looking expression of both these people when it happened.
Good news.
My room mate went on to marry that girl. I stood in their wedding, when I first came back from China they met me at the airport and helped me to surprise my parents. And even though I ruined their first special moment with an act of incoherent nonsensical violence they have remained my friend and they love me and I love them. Amy is among the most loyal of readers of the mess we like to call this blog. Amy and Ryan have progeny now, and little Joseph is a hilarious little scallywag who seems to possess all the best of both these amazing people. And maybe if I hadn't hit Amy with the poster tube the universe would have vibrated in a different circle and maybe all these wonderful things wouldn't have happened. Maybe we would have instead all been eaten by werewolves or drafted into some sort of army for some reason. Maybe. Either way I still don't remember hitting Amy in the head with a poster tube on my birthday when I was young and drunk.
So that was one birthday.
here is another:
It wasn't my idea to have a karaoke birthday party when I turned 36. It was something my friends Andrew and Zac (Zac's an ass) cooked up to coincide with Danni's going away do. I wanted to go to a pub called, well now I can't remember. I just asked Nigel who is here with me now, he can't remember the name of that dive either. But it was the one that was just past Sutos in Surabaya. I just wanted my friends to show up there and have a pint or three and that was the plan. But I have no particular problem with Karaoke so I went along with it. My only caveat was that there should be a bar too so people that didn't want to do the singing could hang out and do the drinking. They wound up booking this massive room which soon became a massive smoke filled room and I was so happy that so many people came. Buck and I sang Free Bird as I recall. The place had a very limited selection of stuff and people got up and belted away. There was a pool table too and all the girls who worked at the front reception desk at work were there, Devi, Wenny, Dessi, Holi and they gave me a little cake. I can't remember much more about it now aside from I had a great time and Dennis and Gary and I probably wound up talking about rock n roll until those two guitar perverts started having their daily droolie mouthed guitar geek out. That's what I remember. Craig and Cecila were there too. Craig was a wonderful guy who we lost not too long ago. I always suspected he stole my chin beard but wore it much better than I did. He was a nice guy, always smiling, always ready to hold his end of a conversation and even though I didn't know him that well I miss him and am sad for his passing.
All I remember from the year before was that we had it at my house and someone turned off the soul music I was playing and put on some godawful shit and I got sore. I am a bit ashamed that a night with all my great friends on the occasion of celebrating my birth and that's all I remember. I also think it was a silly reason to get sore. But I am older now, I am older after all. (Humdullah)
Last year I was on an internship in Morocco. I was in a small city called Kenitra which was near Rabat and had a cafe almost every other shop front filled with men sipping mint tea and talking about the football. The meals were tagines that came with fresh baked breads and the colors and the smiles and the smells and the sounds were like some kind of potent water that soaked into you and left you feeling alive.
It was me and Latoya from our school, our teaching English as a second language grad school. Erica was with us, she had been in our program last year and also interned in Kenitra and had come back to stay. Her boyfriend Hassan was a local former basketball legend and would be stopped in the street by absolutely everyone everywhere just to chat. The conversation translated from Arabic would be
How is your family?
My family is good.
Hamdullah
Hamdullah
I hope you will be well in the future
inshallah
inshallah
then after a few more fast pleasantries they'd part ways and the next people would come everyone was once again smiling and greeting.
This was a very Muslim place. Indonesia was a very Muslim place,( well where I was in Surabaya was anyway) and there there were enough expats that certain places existed where we could go and have a few beers, or in many cases too many and that was allowed and fine and ok. We didn't drink near a mosque, well a few of us did but most of us didn't. I was guilty of things like that before I learned better but I learned fast and became very aware and careful not to offend.
Kenitra was different. The bars there were filled with prostitutes and considered very bad places to go into or be. A good Muslim would never go near such a place, and I was fine with exploring other parts of the culture during my brief time in Morocco.
It was announced to me out of the blue that Hassan and his friends had spoken and agreed that for my birthday we could all sit outside, only on the outside of a bar and I could enjoy a beer. This was no small deal, this was a major concession. It was something that I would have never asked for, something I would have been fine with not happening. I was in Morocco after all, I was a guest in the country and furthermore I didn't need to have a beer in order to be happy. I was very happy.
When they offered to do this for me I saw that it was a genuine gesture from friends that were bending to do something they thought would make me happy.
When we got there the barman came out and told us we couldn't have a beer outside on the street, it wasn't something people did. I said hey it's ok guys we go somewhere else, we do something else. But no, they all agreed to go inside the bar. I don't think they had ever been in one and for them to agree to do that, just to make me happy. It was a gesture that I will always remember. It was the nicest thing anyone has ever done for me on my birthday. I had one beer and we left, they were laughing gleefully the entire time.
I have just had a couple of weeks off for Chinese new year. My old buddy Nigel is here and it has been the coolest (Hamdullah). He came here because he was trying to teach in China and the whole visa dealings with China and Indonesia He was going to teach in China and now things didn't work out so well so he is heading back to England, I would say given the situation for the best, he thinks so too. But that's his story to tell not mine. I just asked him if it's cool to talk about, he says he has no secrets.
It has been a great few weeks, we went hiking, we ate at every amazing dumpling house I know about, he explored, we laughed, we sang. He's a great guy to have around and now that he is leaving in a couple of days I am a bit bummed he can't stay longer, he is a great couch surfer that way.
Yesterday was my birthday and I thought since Nigel is leaving soon we'd do some must do stuff in Hong Kong. We took the MTR subway all the way out to Shatin, which is way the hell up and gone in the New Territories. We had to change train lines four times, the humanity that packs into those things is incredible. The MTR offers a seemingly endless march of hundreds of thousands shoulder to shoulder all eyes fixed on tiny glowing and beeping boxes in their hands. It was about an hour or so, then we finally got to the Hong Kong heritage museum which housed the Bruce Lee exhibit.
I have been once before, and was just as awed and inspired this time around. All of Bruce's philosophies are on display in hand written journal entries into now ancient scraps of paper. Diagrams of martial arts defenses. The entire fight scene against Kareem Abdul Jabar in stick figures including notes on moves and camera angles all written out by the dragon himself. The yellow jumpsuit, the video stories, the photos, the memorabilia. They have a report card from when he was in school, he got a zero in arithmetic. He was failing chemistry and the only class he was doing well in was bible history. Both times I have been there crowds of shocked elderly Hong Kongers huddle around this and tut tut. They would all literally murder their children if they were to ever present anything close to these grades. An old man leaned into me "He get zero in math." His eyebrows raised in disapproving disbelief his jaw hanging open. I don't even know the guy.
And did you know Bruce Lee was super into dancing the cha cha? He was amazing at it. Be water my friend.
Nigel and I went to an area called Mong Kok. See, Nigel used to live in mainland like me and he therefor needs hotpot every few years for the rest of his life. That is the deal, you need dumplings and you need that spicy hotpot or you just dry up and that is that.
Hotpot was the first thing I tasted on my first day in China, at the time I was terrified of it but it has come to be part of me. Take a pot and put the burner on a table. Get a good spicy Sichuan soup broth going and let it bubble. Then they start bringing you plates of thin sliced beef, chicken, pork, fish. They start bringing tofu by the massive bowl, dried fish, we fish, clams, breads. Each thing they bring you put a piece in and watch it cook, as it does so it alters the flavor of the soup. You know how a camp fire brings people together? Hotpot is like that, all eyes focused on the bubbling dripping stew. All are eating and cooking together at the same time. It is the most communal food experience.
So we braved the MTR again through the cattle march of people and we finally got to an outside market. We kept seeing really cool places to eat but no hotpot. We were also seeing loads of tiki tacki crap on offer to tourists. We passed a German tourist yelling at a hawker because the hawker didn't want him taking pictures of his stall. The German was causing a scene, Nigel and I rolled our eyes. Cool expats hate those kinds of tourists, we see them all the damn time too. Don't be that kind of tourist.
Finally I went into a Chinese medicine and herbalists shop. I tried to ask for directions to a good hotpot place, he didn't understand so I asked him in a Cantonese Mandarin hodge podge but he got what I was saying. He directed us to a place that turned out to be a chain. We contacted more friends to tell them where we were, and while waiting Nigel found a really good out of the way hot pot place. My friends from work all came, and because Namu is vegetarian, or the kind of vegetarian that eats fish we got two hotpots. It was amazing, and we must have been eating and drinking beer for three hours straight.
Next, we all bee lined to Wan Chai where we had drinks in a revolving restaurant on top of a high rise over looking the entire Hong Kong sky line. The lounge singer in the corner sang happy birthday for me and it was just perfect. I was on the last ferry home smiling and nowhere near in need of medical intervention having a nice conversation with my mate Nigel. I have grown.
May we all have a hundred more birthdays and may they all be a bit better each year. May we all smile about and never regret our pasts. May we never fear but look forward to our futures with the anticipation of a child waking up on Christmas day. May we come to know ourselves and those around us, what we mean to them and what they mean to us. May we live every single moment of our life like it is the most amazing moment so far. If a bird is singing dig it, don't just keep walking. If someone says something funny don't just laugh but laugh your fool head off, it's good for you. May we all find ways to make the people we care about know we care like my friends in Morocco did. May we all learn to dance the Cha cha like Bruce Lee. May we all live as well and as happily as we can until we drop dead. Inshallah.
One day I was 17, then I was 27 and now I am 37. One day I will 47, 57, and 87 Inshallah. I can't wait, can you?
Thanks for the happy birthday wishes on all the various media hoosie whatsus thing ama hey heys that we are into. It was nice to hear from everyone and I will try to get back to all of you over the next couple of days, even if only a fast sentence about how much you mean to me or to attempt a catch up. But thanks, I feel loved and that is a pretty good thing. You lovie dovies
So it happens, well if we are all lucky (Inshallah) it happens. We go and turn 37. One minute you are reading comics in math class in high school, then you look around and you are in college, then the twenties goes by in a blur and whamo here comes 37. And with any luck 38 will come right behind it (Inshallah).
Aging is part of things and we can embrace it or ignore it or fight it or hate or celebrate. I am neither old nor young. I am somewhere in between. I find hangovers are worse than they used to be. I find little grey hairs in my beard that were once brown. But I am far from old.
My grandmother had me by 60 years. When I was 17 she told me that she had had her time to be 17 and it was wonderful. but now it was her time to be 77 and that was just as nice. So now it's my time to be 37 and I am pretty happy about it. I am in Hong Kong, I make pretty good money for the first time in my life, I live on a small island that is wonderful, I teach which is something I dig, and the food here is holy cow amazing. I think if the 17 year old me saw me now he'd be as happy as I am. Life is good (Hamdula).
I got to thinking back on the past few birthdays I have had. They were pretty good ens (Hamdula) so I thought maybe I'd tell you guys about them. If you think that sounds boring than go screw, who needs you? Jerk. If you think that is cool (Inshallah) than Hamdullah.
I guess I was in my early 20s in the early part of this century. We used to always hang out at a bar called Trackside in Decatur which was where I used to have all my friends show up to get me drunk on the occasion of my birthday. I hadn't the foggiest idea of how to drink then and would just gun drinks until I was in need of medical intervention. One year I got up to sing something at the karaoke that was hosted by this metal head guy, I can't remember much about. He said I could have a shot on his tab when I finished singing. Later in the evening he found me barely able to articulate language and demanded to know how many drinks I had put on his tab. None, they were all from dear friends who all felt the best way to prove their loyalty and friendship would be to replace my blood with Pabst Blue Ribbon and whiskey shots in willy nilly order and maybe a little gin thrown in, maybe just a dash of god knows what else.
I was there with my room mate Ryan who had been talking nonstop about a girl he met, he had brought her to the party that night. Everyone was having a good time and pretty soon I was dead asleep.
I don't remember what happened next.
After a solid week of not speaking to me Ryan finally told me the story. I had fallen asleep holding a poster tube containing a poster for the film Blade Runner that someone had given me. Ryan was in mid-asking this young lady out after finally gathering the courage. Suddenly a very passed out guy on the other side of the table woke up and smacked the young lady in the head with a poster tube and explained that the skin head at the other end of the bar was someone he knew in Boy scouts when he was a kid and that the skin head was a total dick. The skin head, I can only assume and luckily I would add didn't hear any of this. Then this drunk asshole passes right back out and doesn't understand why his room mate is giving the cold shoulder for the rest of the week.
I am embarrassed to tell that story, it was a younger and drunker me, and I still have no memory of it happening except in my mind I can see a very shocked looking expression of both these people when it happened.
Good news.
My room mate went on to marry that girl. I stood in their wedding, when I first came back from China they met me at the airport and helped me to surprise my parents. And even though I ruined their first special moment with an act of incoherent nonsensical violence they have remained my friend and they love me and I love them. Amy is among the most loyal of readers of the mess we like to call this blog. Amy and Ryan have progeny now, and little Joseph is a hilarious little scallywag who seems to possess all the best of both these amazing people. And maybe if I hadn't hit Amy with the poster tube the universe would have vibrated in a different circle and maybe all these wonderful things wouldn't have happened. Maybe we would have instead all been eaten by werewolves or drafted into some sort of army for some reason. Maybe. Either way I still don't remember hitting Amy in the head with a poster tube on my birthday when I was young and drunk.
So that was one birthday.
here is another:
It wasn't my idea to have a karaoke birthday party when I turned 36. It was something my friends Andrew and Zac (Zac's an ass) cooked up to coincide with Danni's going away do. I wanted to go to a pub called, well now I can't remember. I just asked Nigel who is here with me now, he can't remember the name of that dive either. But it was the one that was just past Sutos in Surabaya. I just wanted my friends to show up there and have a pint or three and that was the plan. But I have no particular problem with Karaoke so I went along with it. My only caveat was that there should be a bar too so people that didn't want to do the singing could hang out and do the drinking. They wound up booking this massive room which soon became a massive smoke filled room and I was so happy that so many people came. Buck and I sang Free Bird as I recall. The place had a very limited selection of stuff and people got up and belted away. There was a pool table too and all the girls who worked at the front reception desk at work were there, Devi, Wenny, Dessi, Holi and they gave me a little cake. I can't remember much more about it now aside from I had a great time and Dennis and Gary and I probably wound up talking about rock n roll until those two guitar perverts started having their daily droolie mouthed guitar geek out. That's what I remember. Craig and Cecila were there too. Craig was a wonderful guy who we lost not too long ago. I always suspected he stole my chin beard but wore it much better than I did. He was a nice guy, always smiling, always ready to hold his end of a conversation and even though I didn't know him that well I miss him and am sad for his passing.
All I remember from the year before was that we had it at my house and someone turned off the soul music I was playing and put on some godawful shit and I got sore. I am a bit ashamed that a night with all my great friends on the occasion of celebrating my birth and that's all I remember. I also think it was a silly reason to get sore. But I am older now, I am older after all. (Humdullah)
Last year I was on an internship in Morocco. I was in a small city called Kenitra which was near Rabat and had a cafe almost every other shop front filled with men sipping mint tea and talking about the football. The meals were tagines that came with fresh baked breads and the colors and the smiles and the smells and the sounds were like some kind of potent water that soaked into you and left you feeling alive.
It was me and Latoya from our school, our teaching English as a second language grad school. Erica was with us, she had been in our program last year and also interned in Kenitra and had come back to stay. Her boyfriend Hassan was a local former basketball legend and would be stopped in the street by absolutely everyone everywhere just to chat. The conversation translated from Arabic would be
How is your family?
My family is good.
Hamdullah
Hamdullah
I hope you will be well in the future
inshallah
inshallah
then after a few more fast pleasantries they'd part ways and the next people would come everyone was once again smiling and greeting.
This was a very Muslim place. Indonesia was a very Muslim place,( well where I was in Surabaya was anyway) and there there were enough expats that certain places existed where we could go and have a few beers, or in many cases too many and that was allowed and fine and ok. We didn't drink near a mosque, well a few of us did but most of us didn't. I was guilty of things like that before I learned better but I learned fast and became very aware and careful not to offend.
Kenitra was different. The bars there were filled with prostitutes and considered very bad places to go into or be. A good Muslim would never go near such a place, and I was fine with exploring other parts of the culture during my brief time in Morocco.
It was announced to me out of the blue that Hassan and his friends had spoken and agreed that for my birthday we could all sit outside, only on the outside of a bar and I could enjoy a beer. This was no small deal, this was a major concession. It was something that I would have never asked for, something I would have been fine with not happening. I was in Morocco after all, I was a guest in the country and furthermore I didn't need to have a beer in order to be happy. I was very happy.
When they offered to do this for me I saw that it was a genuine gesture from friends that were bending to do something they thought would make me happy.
When we got there the barman came out and told us we couldn't have a beer outside on the street, it wasn't something people did. I said hey it's ok guys we go somewhere else, we do something else. But no, they all agreed to go inside the bar. I don't think they had ever been in one and for them to agree to do that, just to make me happy. It was a gesture that I will always remember. It was the nicest thing anyone has ever done for me on my birthday. I had one beer and we left, they were laughing gleefully the entire time.
I have just had a couple of weeks off for Chinese new year. My old buddy Nigel is here and it has been the coolest (Hamdullah). He came here because he was trying to teach in China and the whole visa dealings with China and Indonesia He was going to teach in China and now things didn't work out so well so he is heading back to England, I would say given the situation for the best, he thinks so too. But that's his story to tell not mine. I just asked him if it's cool to talk about, he says he has no secrets.
It has been a great few weeks, we went hiking, we ate at every amazing dumpling house I know about, he explored, we laughed, we sang. He's a great guy to have around and now that he is leaving in a couple of days I am a bit bummed he can't stay longer, he is a great couch surfer that way.
Yesterday was my birthday and I thought since Nigel is leaving soon we'd do some must do stuff in Hong Kong. We took the MTR subway all the way out to Shatin, which is way the hell up and gone in the New Territories. We had to change train lines four times, the humanity that packs into those things is incredible. The MTR offers a seemingly endless march of hundreds of thousands shoulder to shoulder all eyes fixed on tiny glowing and beeping boxes in their hands. It was about an hour or so, then we finally got to the Hong Kong heritage museum which housed the Bruce Lee exhibit.
I have been once before, and was just as awed and inspired this time around. All of Bruce's philosophies are on display in hand written journal entries into now ancient scraps of paper. Diagrams of martial arts defenses. The entire fight scene against Kareem Abdul Jabar in stick figures including notes on moves and camera angles all written out by the dragon himself. The yellow jumpsuit, the video stories, the photos, the memorabilia. They have a report card from when he was in school, he got a zero in arithmetic. He was failing chemistry and the only class he was doing well in was bible history. Both times I have been there crowds of shocked elderly Hong Kongers huddle around this and tut tut. They would all literally murder their children if they were to ever present anything close to these grades. An old man leaned into me "He get zero in math." His eyebrows raised in disapproving disbelief his jaw hanging open. I don't even know the guy.
And did you know Bruce Lee was super into dancing the cha cha? He was amazing at it. Be water my friend.
Nigel and I went to an area called Mong Kok. See, Nigel used to live in mainland like me and he therefor needs hotpot every few years for the rest of his life. That is the deal, you need dumplings and you need that spicy hotpot or you just dry up and that is that.
Hotpot was the first thing I tasted on my first day in China, at the time I was terrified of it but it has come to be part of me. Take a pot and put the burner on a table. Get a good spicy Sichuan soup broth going and let it bubble. Then they start bringing you plates of thin sliced beef, chicken, pork, fish. They start bringing tofu by the massive bowl, dried fish, we fish, clams, breads. Each thing they bring you put a piece in and watch it cook, as it does so it alters the flavor of the soup. You know how a camp fire brings people together? Hotpot is like that, all eyes focused on the bubbling dripping stew. All are eating and cooking together at the same time. It is the most communal food experience.
So we braved the MTR again through the cattle march of people and we finally got to an outside market. We kept seeing really cool places to eat but no hotpot. We were also seeing loads of tiki tacki crap on offer to tourists. We passed a German tourist yelling at a hawker because the hawker didn't want him taking pictures of his stall. The German was causing a scene, Nigel and I rolled our eyes. Cool expats hate those kinds of tourists, we see them all the damn time too. Don't be that kind of tourist.
Finally I went into a Chinese medicine and herbalists shop. I tried to ask for directions to a good hotpot place, he didn't understand so I asked him in a Cantonese Mandarin hodge podge but he got what I was saying. He directed us to a place that turned out to be a chain. We contacted more friends to tell them where we were, and while waiting Nigel found a really good out of the way hot pot place. My friends from work all came, and because Namu is vegetarian, or the kind of vegetarian that eats fish we got two hotpots. It was amazing, and we must have been eating and drinking beer for three hours straight.
Next, we all bee lined to Wan Chai where we had drinks in a revolving restaurant on top of a high rise over looking the entire Hong Kong sky line. The lounge singer in the corner sang happy birthday for me and it was just perfect. I was on the last ferry home smiling and nowhere near in need of medical intervention having a nice conversation with my mate Nigel. I have grown.
May we all have a hundred more birthdays and may they all be a bit better each year. May we all smile about and never regret our pasts. May we never fear but look forward to our futures with the anticipation of a child waking up on Christmas day. May we come to know ourselves and those around us, what we mean to them and what they mean to us. May we live every single moment of our life like it is the most amazing moment so far. If a bird is singing dig it, don't just keep walking. If someone says something funny don't just laugh but laugh your fool head off, it's good for you. May we all find ways to make the people we care about know we care like my friends in Morocco did. May we all learn to dance the Cha cha like Bruce Lee. May we all live as well and as happily as we can until we drop dead. Inshallah.
One day I was 17, then I was 27 and now I am 37. One day I will 47, 57, and 87 Inshallah. I can't wait, can you?
