Happy Celeditude 2005!

Happy Birthday to me!

Today I'm 1,087 years old. Or I would be if I were a vampire that had been born in 1822.

It's been a good Celeditude this year. Yesterday I was taken to lunch at Brasserie (not 8 1/2 but the one on 53rd), and that was the bomb. The food there is phenomenal--I had a seafood crepe, the salmon and a mint chocolate mousse thing for dessert, all of it unbelievable. The atmosphere at Brasserie is interesting as well. It looks like it could have been ripped from the celluloid of A Clockwork Orange, Gattaca or maybe a dark scene in Barbarella--there's even a short-haired expressionless woman there doing nothing but walking around the restaurant in her pantsuit. I was pretending she was an android. And that's just the main area--the bathroom is just as dystopian--it smells of ozone or chlorine, and is minimal with that Gattaca feel to it. And there's a message above the sink too, which reads:

TOWASHISTOPURGEISTODENYISTOWASHIS

What the helvv does that mean?! I'm beginning to wonder whether is was some hallucination a la A Beautiful Mind or The Ten Commandments, cux it was backlit and no one else remembered seeing it. Is it a message from Christina (Aguilera) to me?? Hmmm. Anyway, that was Brasserie.

Today I got taken out to the Indian buffet that I love so well. So now I feel like I usually do after those buffets--so full I'm about to burst and debating the idea of purging 'just this once...' Yeah, just this once--sure.... I also got a present today--a bottle of Chanel Pour Monsieur, which fits perfectly with Celeditude because it has topnotes of citrus and neroli (orange blossom), which are traditional for Celeditude. I also got a gift cert. for Target, which I can't wait to spend.

I guess I should give a brief description of the traditions of Celeditude. First of all, the word Celeditude--it doesn't mean anything. I made it up in haste one year and it stuck. So there it is, sticking. But this is why orange and orange blossoms are traditional: I was born in Feb. 3 in Florida. On Feb. 2 the year I was born, a freak snowstorm blew into Florida, blanketing the state in snow. Of course, when snow is forecast in much of the South, people just start running off the road immediately, so the hospitals filled up quickly. My mother went into labor in the wee hours of the morning/late hours of the night, and by the time she got to the hospital there were no beds, and ended up having me and my twin sister in the waiting room, just before sunrise. The sun came out and melted all the snow, and the orange trees burst into blossom. Since there were no beds in the hospital, a nurse went outside and broke some tender branches off an tree and made a makeshift bed that way, so my sister and I were laid on a bed of orange blossoms. And that's the story, in very brief form. I'm actually writing it out in longer form, but knowing me and writing, it probably won't be finished for about 3 years. To this day there are still sightings of me in the orange groves of the city, or in produce departments.

So that's been the birthday so far. No big plans for tonight, the day of, but I have a li'l dinner I'm having in a coupla weeks, to celebrate Celeditude and my roommate's birthday as well, which also falls in February. No big plans for this weekend either, although it's supposed to be sunny both days(!)--that seems like it could be too good to be true, though. Hopefully it's not.

And that's the beep for now.

Beep!
Ed Shepp

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