This week I ran after an armful of threads I’d thrown out into the world last week. Trying to pull my way along each one to its far flung destination has left me feeling a little divided. Happy, but divided. And therefore, largely in lieu of a proper post, here is one of the many birds that has come into my life of late.

There you go.

My dad is in my thoughts tonight: he’s been dizzy ever since he contracted a virus last week, and he had to have an MRI a few days ago to rule out anything major (all was well; his brain is apparently clear as a bell). Although he sounded healthy and cheerful on the phone and I know he does not want me to worry, who is he kidding? So here I am, thinking of my dad. Over the years I have probably mentioned to one or another of you how phenomenal a memory my father has, and bemoaned my own leaky sieve—here, friends, is just how memorious he is. Having been slid into the MRI machine on Friday morning, says my dad, he—supine and sedated—suddenly recalled a particular newspaper article about Michael Jackson that he read 16 years ago.

The story was printed during a visit everyone’s favorite illustrious lunatic was making to our fair island (for a concert that I totally attended and shouted myself quite hoarse at; don’t even try to make me feel embarrassed, because I won’t). My dad remembered it because, he explained, it was about how good old MJ was rushed to a local hospital not once, but twice that day so many years ago, in order to undergo two emergency MRIs that showed absolutely nothing was wrong with his brain (riiiight). Why all the fuss? Mr. Jackson had a headache. Ever the socialist, my father recalls wondering—as he turned the inky page over his morning tea—how on earth the great man’s insurance was willing to pay for such a thing.

Birds; brains; I’m beat. See y’all soon.

Hello, there, Internet. I’m thirty years old today.

I think thirty is the age at which it begins to become traditional to put out a certain amount of angst into the world whenever the weight of a new decade etches itself onto the skin of your face. I think it’s also customary on this particular birthday to begin agonizing over the realization that you have not yet achieved even a quarter of the terribly important plans you placed on your life’s to-do list when you were still young, ambitious, and idiotic.

I thought about doing both of those things today, because I am nothing if not a traditionalist.

Unfortunately, I can’t really bring myself to make too much of a fuss about looking old. One of the benefits of slathering Retin-A onto your face every night for four years, in a never-ending battle against the last scourge of adolescence that still haunts you, is that you eventually take on a certain air of Dorian Gray. And, after all, every single one of my hairs is still black (or perhaps, as the guy who took my information at the DMV declared, they are brown—but I wouldn’t trust him; he also put in that I lived on “Woolawn Avenue” and they had to make me a new card at the end).

As for the to-do list, I don’t know. I wouldn’t say I’ve got it covered, exactly. I still have to put mental quotation marks around the word “career” whenever I say it, I haven’t been to Iceland yet, and while my birthday gifts have been more than generous, a box containing a cat, a dog, and a duck has not yet been forthcoming. I’ve also been a little saddened, lately, by the realization that I’ve now put down strong, living, loving roots in three different cities besides the one where I was born—and I still don’t know where it is my home of all homes will turn out to be.

But when I talked to A. today, I did say that I felt as if I’d basically got my shit together. And you know what, I think I do. Ross and I took an hour and a half walk today, noodling down to the water and circling around our little neighborhood, working off a little of last night’s friendship feast (Internet, not only was I brought two amazingly delicious cakes, a box of pretty cookies, several bottles of wine, a tall bottle of gin, and a veritable field of flowers, but I was given a pan of homemade cinnamon rolls that are baking in the oven even as I type). It was a warm day, for Chicago Winter 2009. There was a strip of pale, delicate blue in the sky where some unseen breath of wind had separated two banks of grey clouds. And there I was, happy and at home, holding the hand of the man I love, humming Miles Davis under my breath and making jokes as we stepped along.