Posted on Thursday, 09/05/24.

It’s my birthday, and I’ve been taking the day slow. There’s no malaise or torpor, I’m just cleaved to a childish assertion that I’m allowed to do whatever I want on my birthday, and this year that means moving as slowly as the sun. It streams through my kitchen window now, leaving a bright diffusion on the opposite wall.

When I was falling asleep yesterday I did what I sometimes do when I manage to separate myself from my phone before unconsciousness—I try to freely recall things: whatever residues from elementary school through high-school have managed to survive the abrasions of a decade. It astounds me, not even abstractly—that these memories are instantiated physically, among the relations between my neurons which, while not quickly replicating and while deep in my skull, are still living and requiring of basic nutrients and gaseous exchange and moderated temperature. How much of my brain is devoted to storing the memory I have of prying nude squirrel mandibles from the clay-rich hillside of my elementary school (abutting the Shell Ridge Open Space, which occasionally burned bare in the years since I moved away)? What about the image of the parents of some distant friend at a neighbor’s Halloween party (out in the backyard under a massive oak tree, at least sixty feet tall, since cut down for safety) wearing a ‘plug and outlet’ couple costume, the uninteresting double-entendre of which I didn’t appreciate at the time. I remember the shiny, bulbous body With an even now unbelievably perfectly glossy and red pair of kissing triangles on its underside. of a black-widow spider that lived for months beneath the large, plastic shell made to look like a boulder, hiding the controls of our California yard’s sprinkler system. I remember rotten pears on our driveway, fallen from the tree. The dense firm deep orange fuyu persimmons that held on to bare branches, just next to the pear tree.

For some period before the age of twelve my life was so free from long-term thought that the weeks leading up to a birthday were charged. Something in this was redoubled by sharing the birthday with a twin, or the coincidence of our birthday and Labor Day, or the start of the California school year. It is embarrassing how quickly the rituals of one’s early birthdays are mythologized and made precious—the bright yellow cakes my mother made during some of our earliest birthdays (decorated with a simple black-lined smiley face, almost Warholian, though done out of convenience and thrift, as many of these early birthdays were devised by her alone, under stress) were recalled by my brother and I near age ten, and requested again specifically for many years Though only after the novelty of various racecar and fantasy-themed cakes had worn off by around age eight.. These were enjoyed as I imagine a forty-eight year-old man enjoys wearing his letter jacket at the first nip of autumn, if only to the gas station and back. That is, toward nothing meaningful.

Last year during my birthday I was in LA, visiting an institute for pure and applied mathematics for a month, living in one fourth of an AirBnb most likely illegally listed and buried in a stuccoed complex at the heart of Westwood. While I know that I was stressed during this month—overtaken by project deadlines and the business of socializing in a professional context among people to whom I wanted to appear both smart and unbothered—I can only remember the time very fondly. The cancerously fiery LA sunsets. My room was built around a balcony of ocher tiles that looked over a thrashed alley towards the spire of Fox Theater. The core of Westwood was built like an insane asylum, and my building’s front door opened almost directly onto a Trader Joe’s, a Target, and a pseudo-chain coffee shop in which I spent multiple mornings programming in preparation for a submission, sipping cortados until they were cold. I loved it. There is nothing real in LA, making it a sympathetic place to do mathematics.

I don’t remember what I did for my birthday—I arrived on the first, and most likely told no-one, and this year is similar. I probably walked down Westwood Blvd., maybe across Wilshire, or even to Santa Monica Blvd. I may have spent time in my tiny, carpeted, internal, blackboard-equipped mini-office, which I had all to myself, and which had gaps up toward the ceiling through which light from the various low, horizontal, slit-like windows of the circa 2000 Gehry building could leak through the blond wood of the place. I could have lived for a decade in the obscurity of that office and felt pleased, I think, if only at the assurance that I would be unable to. It had low pile gray industrial carpets that felt like elementary school. I would eventually make a small bunch of friends during that program, though these wouldn’t persist past its end (I imagine if I had stayed through December—the long program’s end), a mix of Bay Area natives and dark-ringed graduate students, many of whom had come to quantum computing later in their programs, and thus to whom it represented novelty and change. A man in his thirties who quit the startup world to return to research, and wore clear acrylic-framed glasses. I miss, selfishly and over-aesthetically, being around people who grew up in the Bay—certain tics bred by their adjacencies, things they can’t help, those who they went to middle school with, something mildly more practical in their patagonia or fjällräven. For brief flashes recently, as I have settled in here more definitively, I have been seized by a want to go back to the Bay; part of this is that, for the first time since before high-school, I’m not living somewhere dominated by academic affectation; and while a lot of my energy was spent in these places culturing a light distance and disdain for tech-oriented grinding, negative association is only ever lightly concealed affection and dependency. I need them and they need me. I think of sitting in 1369 and listening to two men in their early 30s vaguely discuss how much they’re trying to sell their companies for (and my delicious frisson coming to realize that one of them is positioned much better than the other, and that this is known to both but skirted carefully, both also not acknowledging the other’s silent and petit partner with a severe practical haircut and Heattech puffer vest standing/sitting next to them, &c.).

In the early afternoon I went out to a nearby city center to buy a small amount of stationery (I had hoped for a mix of novelty, and practical, high-cotton paper, though only the former appeared in the right dimension and weight). Already in the area I stopped by a resale shop and purchased a Japanese box set of Twin Peaks; some recent kick for physical media to use with my projector. I buy some face-wash because I didn’t pack any, though I don’t find toner I like. I watch the faces of people in the street. A young man’s heels are band-aided against the fresh green-and-white Nikes. The resale shop is almost entirely tourists at this hour. The full box-set of 蟲師 I had seen a couple weeks ago that had been going for nearly $300 is now gone, and I don’t know why I feel anything about that at all, but I do. Something about, in the absence of people to talk to, a precipitous cleaving to objects that have once brought comfort. The Twin Peaks box set is around $25 at the current exchange rate, which is a moderate price matching or beating used sets online. A couple, perhaps Thai, walk together, the man holding a humongous bag containing a secondhand Gundam figurine in a box. A pair of girls in dark lolita gettup. When I have ridden the trains around 4pm, which I have been doing more often as the office has been quiet, the cars are more filled with students, and the disparity of their uniforms speaks to the relative prestige of their schools. Further into the burbs the boys have popped, semi-wrinkled collars and belted polyester black or navy slacks, backpacks slung on one shoulder. As I pass near Ginza once, a middle-school aged girl steps on the train wearing an extremely neatly pressed sailor-style uniform with blue and red pinstripe accents and a silk-blend like drape. Sailor-uniforms have been largely phased out in favor of catholic-school-adjacent white blouses and long pleated skirts (usually un-patterned), but some of the private all-girls middle-schools seem to maintain it. On the eastern side of Tokyo I see a small group of thin pale boys in gakuran. I imagine leaving the age where one is required to wear a uniform is a mixed experience: suddenly an obvious sign of youth is stripped away. I care too much about constraints, thinking they must always permit strange freedoms inside the regions they enclose.