I Know What I'm Doing (28 page)

My birthdate has always been a bummer for me. August 28. No kid likes the end of the summer—it means that the days are getting shorter, the weather is getting colder, and it’s time for back-to-school shopping. Anyone with a birthday right before Labor Day ends up getting Trapper Keepers and pencil boxes for their birthday. Those aren’t presents. Those are supplies. Don’t even begin to tell me your sob stories, you people who have birthdays right around Christmas. Sure, maybe you get a few less gifts, but the season you were born in is nicknamed “the most wonderful time of the year.” People are holly and jolly and enjoying that lazy limbo between December 25 and New Year’s Eve where the only thing to do is eat. Everyone wants to go to parties and be social and wear sequins. My birthday is also near a holiday—LABOR Day. I’m in a few unions and so I’ve benefited from the American Labor movement but the holiday marking said movement is not a
fun
fete. It falls during a time of year that throws everyone into a panic. We have to do everything we can to enjoy these last days of summer! We have to leave town! People are literally
evacuating
in advance of my birthday.

I never got my locker decorated by friends on my birthday because school was not in session. Our first-grade teacher, Mr. Connolly, used to pick up a kid if it was his or her birthday to administer “birthday taps.” The class would count in unison, “One! Two! Three! Four! Five! Six! Seven!” as Mr. Connolly gently patted every kid on the bum, spinning them in a circle. I realize now that this guy sounds a little suspect. But at the time, in good old 1981, you could just pick up any kid in a gymnasium and pretend to slap their ass. And even though that’s really fucked up, I was always sad to be excluded from the G-rated molestation.

As an adult the tradition of birthday disappointment continues. My friends are never around during my birthday/long weekend. I’m not a fan of those dreaded weeknight birthday parties. “Sorry I’m four hours late, traffic. I had to work. Oh, it’s over?”

“No. You’re the only one who showed up. You can go. I’m just going to settle up with the bartender for these three drinks I had alone.”

Months before the date, friends asked, “What are you doing for your fortieth?” I always retorted, “I don’t know. What are
you
doing for my fortieth?” I couldn’t believe that nobody was going to throw me a surprise party. Sure, I’ve never thrown any of
them
a surprise party but they never asked me to.

My two girlfriends I grew up with in Massachusetts had been trying to pin me down for a special fortieth-birthday trip all year. But comedy gigs always come up on short notice for me and I didn’t want to make my friends with kids and husbands have to cancel a trip to Italy that we had planned or worse, go on it without the birthday girl. Besides, what if I found a boyfriend before my fortieth? To be perfectly honest, as much as I love traveling with girlfriends and have told you in this very book that no one needs a man to have a good time—if I had a man to be madly in love with in Italy, I hate to say it but I might prefer that right now. And I don’t want to be that person on a girls’ trip who brings her boyfriend at the last minute. “You guys will love Adam. Feel free to tell him all of your intimate details about your hemorrhoids. He won’t mind!”

I just couldn’t commit to one idea for my birthday. I could have thrown a party but I already did that for my thirty-ninth birthday. (I feel like that’s the year you should really blow it out anyway.) While a couple of my best friends could come,
most
of my close friends were out of town. I had to dip into friends who I see once a year just to make the bar I rented out seem full and lively. When I got the check I thought,
Is
this what I want to spend a thousand bucks on? Appetizers and overpriced drinks made by a self-proclaimed mixologist?
I decided that I didn’t want to throw myself another party for my fortieth. The expectations of it having to be great, life-changing, and monumental would have made me mental. A lot of my friends who were single the year before were now coupled up. This causes a divide in my circle. One single friend—before I even started to plan this nonexistent party—said, “I can’t go to a party where it’s all couples. I’m just too depressed about it. I know you’re single too but you’re the birthday girl so it doesn’t count.”

My coupled-up friends preannounced that they couldn’t make it to this, again, nonexistent party because they were going away for a three-day weekend, but they promised to have me come over so they could make me dinner some night. (Attention, couples! No one but other couples wants to come over to your house for dinner. That’s fine and dandy that you love cooking. Cook your face off. But I’m not in the marriage with you so I find it snug—but not in the good “as a bug in a rug” way. When single people sit at your dining room table with you and your spouse we feel like your kid—the one you’re secretly disappointed in for still living at home at age forty.)

So when I got an offer to perform at a comedy festival in Lund, Sweden, the week of my fortieth birthday—I knew that was the answer. Yes. I’m going to get straight OUTTA here and go overseas alone . . . again. I was the only American asked to fly in for the festival and I felt it was quite an honor. What isn’t an honor is flying on Norwegian airlines. Their tagline should be, “You want a blanket on this overnight flight? Fuck you. We don’t have any.” Performing in the festival was a comedy utopia. Some acts performed in Swedish, some acts performed in English. The perfectly bilingual audience didn’t miss a beat on English slang or expressions. The last night of my thirties was spent performing for this once-in-a-blue-moon crowd. People came up to me later to tell me that although they loved my jokes about how divorced people are treated weirdly, they couldn’t personally relate. Divorce, sexuality, and marriage equality have been normalized in Sweden and mostly they were laughing at American attitudes toward these subjects. I thought,
Wow. I could really love living here for . . . a few weeks, then I would have to move.
Their winters are too brutal and everyone is too good-looking. I like living in America because I need to lay eyes on terminally ugly people every once in a while just to feel better about myself.

At the after-party, I told the festival coordinators my plan to take the train in the morning (my fortieth birthday) to Stockholm—just for a little twenty-four-hour getaway. They were concerned and flustered. It was my birthday the next day and I was going to go to Stockholm alone? And do what? And see whom? If I had only told them that it was my birthday they would have had a cake and tried to make it special. I assured them that I don’t like birthday cake. I really don’t. I would rather eat a bag of candy corn or black licorice than a piece of cake. See? I’m a sociopath.

I made a few new friends that night, and when the bartender in the hotel’s restaurant refused to sell us a bottle of champagne at five minutes to midnight, they lowered their voices and in Swedish said . . . something. Within minutes we had two bottles of champagne and four birthday candles. There wasn’t a cake so we just lit and held the candles while I blew them out. Greg, one of my new friends, an American expat who moved to Sweden for love and marriage, told me that he could hook me up with his friend in Stockholm for my birthday. Greg was very concerned that I would regret not making a solid plan for my birthday. I did have a solid plan. I was going to wander until I found an Italian restaurant. It’s a Classic Kirkman travel move; a table for one, some ravioli, and red wine. Greg insisted that I give him my number so that he could pass it on to his buddy—a divorced forty-year-old American guy living in Stockholm. I said, “Fine. Give him my number but I may not text back.”

“It’s up to you, Jen. But you’ll like him. He’s my only friend who isn’t a total loser.” What a ringing endorsement.

I sat on the train to Stockholm smiling. My birthday still makes me happy. I just thought to myself,
It’s my special day
. I checked into my hotel in Stockholm and was told by the front desk that a friend of mine from America had tried to send me a bottle of wine. He apologized that the bottle of wine
did
make it to the front desk but they weren’t allowed to sign for alcohol unless I was there so it’s gone now. I said, “Can the guy with the wine come back?” The concierge explained, “Yes, but we don’t know what time he can come back and you would have to sit here all evening.” I figured that would be a pretty stupid way to spend my birthday so I got dressed and headed out into the night. I found an Italian restaurant, a table for one, and I got busy enjoying good food and a good book (well, a good Kindle). Just as I was finishing up I started to get tired. I felt content.

And then a text popped up from Greg’s friend Max. I really wanted to just go back to my room but I had that nagging feeling. I found myself thinking,
What if this is why you were supposed to go to Stockholm on your birthday, Jen? Maybe you’ll hit it off with this guy. You’re always saying you would date an age-appropriate divorcé—well, one is texting you right now!
I don’t know if I’m a true romantic or just an idiot with an ample imagination or if there’s even a difference.

Max told me where to meet him and I got a little lost on the way there. I had to stop in a pastry shop to ask directions. The cashier tried to help me by showing me a map. I had to explain to him that I really don’t know how to comprehend maps. I know that’s not an acceptable attribute. I’m working on it. Actually I’m not working on it but it’s on my list of things to figure out how to do—right after “figure out the meaning of life.” Once I was properly armed with a list of lefts and rights to take, a female customer said to me, “You may not have direction but you have style. Your outfit is fantastic. And I hate people and talking to people so for me to even say this—you know you’ve got it going on.” Those kinds of interactions always make me think that if women ran the world there could be world peace.

Max and I met up at the Gondolen restaurant and bar, which lies like a bridge across the street and offers views of the city out of its floor-to-ceiling picture windows. That is probably the nicest thing I can say about that evening. I’m not someone who warms up to anyone slowly. If I’m attracted to you, I know within the first second. It doesn’t mean I’ll sleep with you, date you, or move in with you—it just means anything is possible and I’m sticking around to find out. Max and I had no initial spark. He made a joke about my lateness due to my bad sense of direction, which I tried to defend by saying, “Well, I’ve only been here about three hours and I don’t have my glasses on.”

“Why don’t you have your glasses on?”

“I mostly refuse to accept that I have to wear glasses.”

“Why don’t you get contacts, four-eyes?”

Okay. No one should call anyone four-eyes after age eight. In fact no one should call anyone four-eyes if it isn’t 1965. I told him the story of the woman in the pastry shop who complimented my style and he said, “That didn’t happen. You’re just making up stories about people who weren’t actually there, now aren’t ya? Is that what you do with your time? Talk to imaginary friends?”

A little romantic tête-à-tête is fine. I can spar, but this guy was already full-on busting my balls. I could have said, “How long have you been divorced, and did all of your hairs leave your head when she did because they can’t stand you either?” But I didn’t. I kept the faith that Greg had said this was his least worst friend.

I figured I would give him a minute to relax—maybe he just didn’t know that you don’t have to try to be funny to hang out with a comedian. We ordered some drinks and he told me about his life. He was vague about what he did for a living. He had just left a job in some kind of finance financing of something to do with financials but he said that he would rather be camping now or surfing. Whenever someone tells me that they surf it always stops me in my tracks.
Ohhhh, that’s cool. I should give him a chance. It would be fun to date a surfer and have someone to hit the waves with.
Then I remind myself,
Jen, you don’t surf
.
^I

Anyway, back in Sweden I started to figure out that Max might just be bad at holding down a job. Upon further questioning it turns out that he had never actually camped or surfed—it’s just what he would
want
to do. Just like me, he doesn’t want kids and isn’t sure if he would marry again but he enjoys Stockholm, where he moved for his now ex-wife. (Sidebar: Is this where all the men are going? I felt like performing a raid all over Stockholm, knocking on doors asking, “Is there an American man in there? I need him to give
me
a shot first before he settles down with this blond beauty.”)

Our conversation certainly flowed but after an hour I noticed that Max never asked me one question about myself. It’s okay, though, I can have a good time with anyone because I just pretend I’ve replaced Barbara Walters and I’m doing an interview special in my head. “Max, what do you say to people who say that you’re just a dreamer who is never going to go camping? It’s okay to cry, Max.”

I tried to ask for the check but Max insisted that we have one more drink. He said he couldn’t let me go home at eleven on my birthday—it would make him feel sad. It seemed like staying on a blind date that I didn’t want to be on was way more sad than climbing into luxurious hotel bedding and reading
InStyle
magazine. After some back-and-forth I won the battle. We would close out after only one round. The bartender handed me the check. Okay, listen, I’m glad that Sweden is so progressive and feminist and all but it was my birthday. I let the check sit there, giving Max plenty of time to reach for his wallet, but he just said, “Are you ready?” I could have stood up but I feared he would lead us out without paying. So I plunked down my cash. He didn’t say thanks. He didn’t even offer to pay half. I spent my birthday buying a stranger drinks. What a bunch of
skitsnack.