Erin Go Braless

Well, Happy St. Paddy's and all that. I am celebrating by having a Jamesons and soda and a beer back, because I just got home after putting in a nice 12 hour work day and my feet hurt. Downtown is full of twenty somethings in green t-shirts and sparkly wigs falling all over each other on the sidewalk. On three blocks of Biltmore Avenue alone I saw one couple who were clutched in a tight embrace - gods, I'm getting old. Susan and I went to the Admiral on Saturday night for a couple of drinks and there were people dancing. "Look," I said, pointing. "That couple is slow dancing. Do you think we should go over there with a ruler and get them to separate?" - and another couple who were having a nice loud drunken spat all the way up the street. I stopped and gave a dollar to Earl. "How you doin'?" I said, which is code for "Is anybody giving you money?"
And he said, as he usually does, "Not good, baby, not good."
"But these people are all drunk," I said, fishing a dollar out of my purse. "You'd think they'd be generous."
"They just walk right on by me like they don't even see." he said bitterly and I watched for a moment and agreed. Well. It's not like I haven't walked by my share of beggars over the years.

I wore green today just like I do every year. I wore a skirt with green in it and green earrings and green bracelets and even a green camisole although nobody except me saw that, which is somewhat of a pity, because it is a very stridently lime green camisole. It's important to wear green on St. Patrick's day or the anti Irish demons will, um, do something. I've always worn green and forced my children to do so as well, going so far as to actually MAKE my daughter a green skirt before afternoon kindergarten one memorable year, but nothing much has ever resulted from this religious observance. One year somebody did buy me a drink unexpectedly, so, well, I suppose it's all good.

In other news, an old boyfriend found me on Facebook and that was cool, except it suddenly occurred to me while I was driving home that he is now in his mid forties! Agh! How can this be? Old girlfriends of mine have been contacting me via the horrible vortex that is Facebook (I thought I didn't understand it before. Now they have changed the interface. Forget it. You know, I've been active online for a long, long time. I have a blog and I know simple HTML tags and all in all I pride myself on being pretty damn tech savvy, at least when compared to a control group of elderly peasant women from a small country in the Mongolian hills, but Facebook is beyond me. I just cannot figure it out. ) and I realize, in some abstract way that hey, I am over forty and they are therefore over forty but it doesn't seem, somehow, surprising or wrong. Realizing that my old boyfriend Jack from the dim and distant past is now, as he always has been, my age, freaked me right the fuck out. This aging thing is too damn inescapable, I feel. It needs to be caught and stopped now. Although not by becoming a vampire because, ew. Too trendy.