Today is my birthday!

While I deliberately haven�t gone back and read over them, I am aware that this time last year I was in the midst of a rather substantial depressive funk. It had to do with my birthday, but not my age.

This year, however, there is no depression of any kind to be seen. To do with either my birthday or my age. Partly because until this morning I had been constantly forgetting that my birthday was imminent � so much so that when I spoke to Mum yesterday and she said she�d call me today, I couldn�t figure out why she would need to do that given I just saw her yesterday � and I�m actually kind of happy about my age.

32. For some reason 32 seems like a pretty good age to me. Before the down-hill slide I guess.

And as I have mentioned before, I actually feel like I�ve done something in the past year, so I can be thirty-two without feeling like I�ve only achieved to a 25 year-old standard.

I was feeling all of this before my actual birthday. But my general good birthday mood was enhanced by the day dawning sunny and spring-like. Warm enough to break-out my bright pink spring coat, which inevitably puts a spring in the step.

I also had my hair done on Saturday (thank God, I was so overdue for an appointment that I�ve spent three weeks trying to hide the total disaster that was my roots), so it�s all straight and flippy and perfectly coloured.

And I have now totally recovered from yesterday�s hangover, created by the Smurfettes coming over for a quiet dinner on Saturday night. Which turned into more bottles of wine being drunk than there were people and one of those truly annoying sneaky hang-overs. It was one of those nights where we didn�t really notice how drunk we were. As I was at home there was not that struggle to get home gage of general intoxication, and I even cleared up before I went to bed. So I must have been fine. But then I woke up too early yesterday morning, feeling a bit dehydrated but fine, aside from the fact that I was awake at 7am on a Sunday. Never a good sign. I managed to doze for another couple of hours before dragging myself out of bed. And still I was mainly okay, but had a sneaking suspicion that I shouldn�t eat anything. I had crossed over from �still drunk� to �hungover�. And putting the bottles out to be recycled confirmed why. More bottles than people. Within an hour of getting up I was a total wrecked mess and not much company for Mum for my birthday lunch. In fact it wasn�t until 3pm that I was actually okay and craving a Big Mac.

All of which is to say that feeling like shit (even though self-inflicted) yesterday only makes today even sunnier. And the fact I wound up that way by hanging out with friends, as opposed to last year when everyone I knew was away for my birthday, was pretty cool.

No more depressive birthdays for me.

(Well, at least not until I�m, say, 35.)