Life is definitely more exciting in movies.
There are plots. A developing story. Obstacles that are overcome. Interesting characters. Magical items.
Sometimes my life comes close. There are many times in my life, days where I look at whoever I’m with and say, “Did that really just happen?”
And then there are times in my life when my dreams are far more interesting.
Sometimes there are places I want to be and things I want to do that are just out of my reach. Last October, for my best friend’s birthday, I couldn’t go celebrate with him because he lives in Tokyo and the taxi fare would have been just a little too much. But I was there in spirit. And in my imagination, we went out and had an amazing night.
In Tokyo there is no crime. You can walk around at any time of night and feel completely safe. No one locks their bikes. It’s amazing.
On the night of Justin’s birthday, we woke up and the sun was shining. He lives in this amazing apartment with a sportswear designer roommate, big picture windows, and a tiny back garden with a mini fire pit and a fountain. I sabered open a bottle of champagne and made chocolate chip pancakes and we sat around the garden drinking mimosas and discussing our plan of attack for the day. I promised I would help him spruce up his pad right, so after breakfast we got our goggles and suited up in our white painter jumpsuits before gathering all the paint in the house and starting in.
There’s this great side room in his apartment that opens onto the garden. It’s southfacing, so it gets amazing light all day and we wanted to trap it in and magnify it so got some metallic gold paint and went to work. Before long we got all the ceiling and the walls completely covered in it and it started to look like some crazy egyptian tomb and we had to put on out sunglasses to finish it.
I had made this big drawing of mountains and the sea cascading into this giant pile of brightly colored shapes that were supposed to climb up the walls. We set up the projector and Justin made shadow puppets and danced around to some great funk records while I outlined everything. He started on a ladder at the sky and I started on the floor to paint the ocean and before long we had met on the mountain and climbed up to the crazy shapes. By then it was late and we were exhausted, but we had a ton of stuff to do, so we drank some crazy ass Japanese energy drinks that I swear should have been illegal and I clicked my heels three times and we were on our bikes, flying kites off the back of them through the streets with Justin’s mini ghetto blaster blasting from his basket.
This kind of thing, plus not being Japanese tends to get some attention in Tokyo, and we stopped at lights and struck poses while people on the sidewalk took surreptitious photos on their smartphones.
We went to a friend’s house and she made us some cold noodles and we slurped and slurped while she got ready to go out. This girl is amazing. She has a closet full of wigs and ended up wearing a giant blond beehive with seriously fake lashes and a blue metallic bodysock with platforms built in. She took us to this crazy club that was built to look like a treehouse. You could climb and climb into these little platform rooms and every room had a different drink special. At the top of the fake treehouse was this room that mimicked dawn every 45 minutes and had this infinity pool with, I kid you not, japanese mermaids swimming in it. If you dove in and held your breath, you could go to this totally awesome secret room with one glass wall where you could watch the mermaids swimming, and a deck with a sauna and a ton of plants that looked out across the city. It was unreal, some weird gateway between jungle and metropolis that totally looked like one of those portals in sci-fi movies to a different universe.
We got lost in the treehouse, and by then we were a little less than coherent, but somehow I remember finding a tiny little door, like in Alice in Wonderland, that set you out into the street. By then we had somehow collected more people and we stopped at a karaoke bar, but after the treehouse club it seemed kind of lame, so we came home instead and put on an impromtu shadow puppet opera with our new friends and a bunch of random japanese opera records we had found mixed with Sun Ra samples before watching the sunrise in the golden room, which was totally bad ass and actually felt like a womb it was so warm from the light.
It was a totally bad ass birthday, even without a birthday cake. It was okay though, because when we finally woke up there was a giant mountain of strawberry cupcakes being carefully constructed in the kitchen. It was almost too beautiful to eat, but then we ate it and omg it was even better.
Birthdays like this are definitely too awesome to not come true sometime soon. I swear. My life is like a movie.
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Awesomeee!