Brunch Birthday Quotes

I’ve watched it time and time again—a woman always slots into a man’s life better than he slots into hers. She will be the one who spends the most time at his flat, she will be the one who makes friends with all his friends and their girlfriends. She will be the one who sends his mother a bunch of flowers on her birthday. Women don’t like this rigmarole any more than men do, but they’re better at it—they just get on with it. This means that when a woman my age falls in love with a man, the list of priorities goes from this: Family Friends To this: Family Boyfriend Boyfriend’s family Boyfriend’s friends Girlfriends of the boyfriend’s friends Friends Which means, on average, you go from seeing your friend every weekend to once every six weekends. She becomes a baton and you’re the one at the very end of the track. You get your go for, say, your birthday or a brunch, then you have to pass her back round to the boyfriend to start the long, boring rotation again. These gaps in each other’s lives slowly but surely form a gap in the middle of your friendship. The love is still there, but the familiarity is not. Before you know it, you’re not living life together anymore. You’re living life separately with respective boyfriends then meeting up for dinner every six weekends to tell each other what living is like. I now understand why our mums cleaned the house before their best friend came round and asked them “What’s the news, then?” in a jolly, stilted way. I get how that happens. So don’t tell me when you move in with your boyfriend that nothing will change. There will be no road trip. The cycle works when it comes to holidays as well—I’ll get my buddy back for every sixth summer, unless she has a baby in which case I’ll get my road trip in eighteen years’ time. It never stops happening. Everything will change.

I was Pittsburgh Young, Black, and Successful. Pittsburgh Young, Black, and Successful meant Friday evenings downstairs at Savoy in the Strip District, and perhaps a table upstairs if it was your birthday. It meant Alpha and Que boat rides, NEED Scholarship dinners, and Ronald H. Brown Leadership Awards galas. It meant a stint on the Urban League Young Professionals executive board. It meant brunches at the LeMont on Mother’s Day and the Grand Concourse when you wanted to stunt. It meant frequent pictures in the Post-Gazette and the City Paper

Once upon a time I'd left Los Angeles and been swallowed down the throat of a life in which my sole loyalty was to my tongue. My belly. Myself. My mother called me selfish and so selfish I became. From nineteen to twenty-five I was a mouth, sating. For myself I made three-day braises and chose the most marbled meats, I played loose with butter and cream. My arteries were young, my life pooling before me, and I lapped, luxurious, from it. I drank, smoked, flew cheap red-eyes around Europe, I lived in thrilling shitholes, I found pills that made nights pass in a blink or expanded time to a soap bubble, floating, luminous, warm. Time seemed infinite, then. I begged famous chefs for the chance to learn from them. I entered competitions and placed in a few. I volunteered to work brunch, turn artichokes, clean the grease trap. I flung my body at all of it: the smoke and singe of the grill station, a duck's breast split open like a geode, two hundred oysters shucked in the walk-in, sex in the walk-in, drunken rides around Paris on a rickety motorcycle and no helmet, a white truffle I stole and shaved in secret over a bowl of Kraft mac n' cheese for me, just me, as my body strummed the high taut selfish song of youth. On my twenty-fifth birthday I served black-market fugu to my guests, the neurotoxin stinging sweetly on my lips as I waited to see if I would, by eating, die. At that age I believed I knew what death was: a thrill, like brushing by a friend who might become a lover.

These were my grandmother’s last words: “I have wasted my life.” “Thanks a lot,” said my mother, who tended to make everything about her. I said, “What do you mean, Grandma?” I was interested, as I hoped to learn from her mistakes. I may even have gotten pen and paper ready. (Perhaps my mother and I were more alike than we realized.) “Of course you haven’t, Mum,” said Auntie Pat. But my grandmother just sighed and fiddled irritably with the button on the blue brunch coat I’d bought her for her last birthday. She would really have preferred a paler blue but she supposed it would do. Grandma never said another word. She died ten days later. You never know what your last words are going to be, so try to choose them all wisely.

You already have a lot of ideas about Hell. It’s amazing what Dante and thousands of years of folklore can do to a place’s reputation. I mean, I’m not going to lie to you: it is Hell. It’s not fantastic. But let’s see if this is relatable: You’re late to your aunt’s boyfriend’s birthday brunch because your alarm was on mute even though you know you turned it up the night before. You barrel onto the subway, managing to squeeze yourself between the woman blasting a Techno for the Lonely playlist and the man who farts every time he sneezes, and, just when the lights of the station are out of view, the train lurches to a stop with a death rattle and goes dark. The woman elbows you in the gut as she hits Replay, and the man’s snot tickles as it spays your cheek, and you think about how you don’t even like your aunt’s boyfriend or even your aunt and you hate brunch, and what do you see? I’ll tell you; I’ve heard it a million times. You say, ‘This is Hell’. Well, you're right. That's Hell. At least the top floors of it.