There is a subdued but tangible excitement in the office today. Everyone is working quietly and at breakneck pace, trying to get their things in order for the last trading day of the month and talking in hushed tones about the long weekend and plans for summer. Behind me, the tv is on mute, stock tickers flashing by on CNBC and Bill Griffeth talking about fuel prices. The Dow Jones is down eighteen points.

Greg and I had dinner at our favourite Forest Hills restaurant yesterday. We sat outdoors in the rapidly cooling night air, munching on salmon and steak and rice and beans and maduros and baccalaitos, playing with my new cellphone and sending each other silly messages across the table as we waited for Jess and Marc to join us for coffee.

Days like today are a study in human behaviour. The long Memorial Day weekend lies ahead, sprawled lazy like a tired giant and promising the start of summer. Everyone should be excited, everyone should be raring to go, everyone should be running about and high fiving each other. But instead the office is filled with a nervous energy, everyone's moods tempered by the monotones of un-summerlike weather and uninspired umbrellas jostling about below. Everyone wants to get their work done, everyone wants to get out of the city.

Outside, a gray fog blots out the tops of a hundred midtown skyscrapers.

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So I'm thirty-two today.

Thirty-two. Why does that sound so foreign to me? Why does it sound so unfamiliar? When did I become one of those people for whom the years pile on layer after layer, swift like the blink of an eye and hurrying by just as unnoticed?

I spent much of my twenties looking at thirty-two as some sort of magical age. I'm not sure why the fascination with the number, but it held some strange power over me, and I dreamed about what it would be like to be thirty-two. It always seemed a responsible age, a milestone of sorts where one could take stock of one's life and see where things stood, see where things were going. I dreamed about thirty-two a lot, fantasized even. It was an ideal age.

Why then, does it seem so unfamiliar to me now?

My colleagues brought me birthday donuts yesterday. They took me out for drinks after work, half a dozen strong ones in under an hour. Today, they brought me a silly homemade cut-and-paste tabloid, bought me my favourite cupcakes, made me their special iced coffee. They always make me laugh. They're a good bunch of guys, my colleagues.

Why then, do I feel so strange?

I look back to my twenties now and wonder about this strange fascination with thirty-two. What is it that signifies so much more to me than, say, twenty or thirty? Aren't the decades what most people use as their milestones? I'm thirty-two now, and I wonder to myself: Am I where I want to be? Am I what I thought I would be, way back when? Way back when I was in my twenties? Way back when seems so close by now, more so than most years gone by, and more so than ever today. I look around to take stock, and what do I see? I see a wonderful partner, I see a wonderful family, I see wonderful, truly wonderful friends. I'm really lucky to have what I have, and trust me, I really know it.

Happy birthday, me.

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I sat on the sofa this morning, sipping on hazelnut coffee and watching through the office window a steady drizzle begin to soak the midtown skyscrapers. In the strange stillness that sometimes saturates the seventeenth floor, the cup came to a momentary pause near my lips and I sat in early morning coma, inhaling the steam that escaped from its contents and into the chilly air. All around me, my colleagues yawned.

I've been in a funk over the past couple of days. I can't seem to get a handle on what it is or where it's coming from, but it's a perplexing feeling of doubt and anxiety that sneaks up and settles over me mostly at night, an insecurity blanket of diffidence that sits uneasily about like the gray clouds over Manhattan today.

My colleagues surprised me with breakfast donuts when I returned to my desk. "You always take your birthday off," they said, "and so we were afraid you'd not be in the office tomorrow." I stared at the single yellow candle stuck gingerly into a Boston Cream, its tiny flame flickering below the grinning faces of my colleagues. It's too early for this, I thought as I laughed and hollered and thanked everyone for the birthday eve surprise.

And just before I blew the candle out, I made a tiny wish. I wished a wish we all sometimes wish, a wish we all make when we're feeling the way I'm feeling now, one that we sometimes make even though we have it so good there's hardly a thing that can be done to make things better.

I closed my eyes tight and held my breath and wished I could be happy again.

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"Wait, wait, wait, we cannot let him go yet. We have to get his number into my mobile," she said, her Parisian accent thick as molasses and hanging heavy in the cool night air. Orly pouted as she rummaged through her purse. "Okay," she said, "I am ready now."

"Neuf, uhm, une, uhm, sept," I began.

"No, no, no, in English." Her friend giggled and clapped her hands. There I was at four in the morning, standing outside the emptying bar with two French girls clinging to my arms and trying to coax my phone number out of me. "Good," she said. "And now, now I will give you mine."

Bob and Homer waved me on. "Okay," I said as I rejoined them. "Where to?"

The three of us wandered over to Bob's apartment, where we tiptoed around as quietly as we could. "Don't worry," Bob said, pointing to the closed bedroom door. "Larry will sleep through anything." We drank tall glasses of water and played with Bob's cats, watching from the balcony the skies brighten slowly to the east. Sometime later, Homer and I bade Bob farewell and headed down Eighth Avenue, bantering as intelligently as two intoxicated men can before we, too, parted.

***

Saturday night wasn't supposed to be a late night. It was supposed to be a subdued night, a night for a spur-of-the-moment but quiet dinner with Byrne, Bob, Homer, Mark, Atticus, and the delightful Betsy and Deidre. How we ended up chugging cocktails and shots into the wee hours of Sunday morning, I may never know.

That's what Friday evening was supposed to be for.

What started out as a few out-of-towners visiting the Big Apple managed to somehow mushroom into a virtual who's-who of the gay blogger world, dozens and dozens of us descending Friday evening like a flock of wild birds onto our favourite midtown bar. Of course, the usuals were there: Matt, Byrne, Bob, and Steve. Charlie was there too, as were Homer, Zeitzeuge, Mezzanine, Zenchick, MzOuiser, Glennalicious, Accidental New Yorker, Epenthesis, Michael Vernon, Addaboy, Famous Author Rob Byrnes, Manhattan Dan, and BoiFromTroy. Certainly there were more, but my memory fails me at this moment. I crawled into bed at three on Saturday morning.

By most standards, Friday was somewhat tame, everyone initially a bit nervous and perhaps a bit more reserved than usual. And although there were the standard hugging and flirting and groping and drunkdialing and singing "Rainbow Connection" and showing of tattoos and drinking beers and sipping cocktails and chugging shots, the evening was all about meeting the faces behind the words.

To that ideal, the weekend certainly did not fail.

***

Six o'clock this morning, and Fahad is stuck in traffic driving me home east on the Long Island Expressway. An ambulance rushes past, its sirens and flashing lights jolting me from slumber as we creep past the carnage of a three-car accident. He looks to the rear-view mirror and sees that I am awake. "You have a good time tonight, sir?" he asks.

I look to my cellphone, Orly's phone number freshly programmed into it, and memories of new friends made over the past two nights. "Most certainly," I reply. "Most certainly."

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"Don't you fret, M'sieur Marius. I don't feel any pain."

That's how I think it all started last night. Of course, I can't be too certain, given the amount of alcohol involved in a night out with Matt, Byrne and Bob. Just two rounds and we'll be done for the evening? Yeah, whatever.

Someone started singing Eponine's "A Little Fall of Rain" as we left the bar, the series finale of Friends fresh on everyone's minds. Once again, I'm not sure who it was, but in the short minutes that followed, what started as a barely audible whisper of an inebriated soloist quickly became a drunken and rowdy quartet. There we were, outside Ray's Pizza on eighteenth and sixth, screaming at the top of our lungs songs from Wicked and Les Misérables, all of which we had so delightfully discovered on Matt's iPod.

Ah, to be drunk and shameless in Manhattan.

We sang for what seemed like an eternity, curious passersby gawking in horrified awe as we belted out our none-too-sober rendition of "The Rainbow Connection" into Matt's pizza-turned-microphone. Poor Zenchick, she too got an earful of our quartet when we drunk-dialed her.

Ah, to be shameless. Ah, to be hungover. It's a good thing today's been miserably hectic enough that I don't have time to think about last night's consequences on my liver.

Oh, and M'sieur Marius? You can fret now. Today I feel pain.

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