Important Discoveries

I turned thirty on Friday. Last year I shared Gumwads of Wisdom in honor of my birthday. This year I will share my Important Discoveries, because I'm a lot like Christopher Columbus in that I make Important Discoveries and people celebrate me once a year.

Here they are, my Important Discoveries:

1. Illegal fireworks make an excellent substitute if you forget to buy birthday candles. Anyone catch the illegal firework action around 7:30 on Friday night? Happy birthday to me.

2. Skinny jeans aren't so bad. Yes, I once felt as you do: skinny jeans make the wearer look like a Seuss character and there is no possible way that they are comfortable. Skinny jeans are a silly trend like pegged pants, organic food, and Barack Obama. I tried some on during my birthday shopping, mostly as a joke, but partly because I like to torture myself.
"Ha ha," I thought to myself, "this is going to be a hoot."
I chose a pair two sizes larger than I normally wear, just to be safe. (Safety first when trying on skinny jeans, that's my motto.)
After trying them on, I made three sub-discoveries:
a) The importance of removing your shoes before putting on skinny jeans cannot be emphasized enough.
b) Skinny jeans don't flop around your ankles and get wet in puddles, two attributes of normal pants that I can't stand.
c) Skinny jeans are super comfortable (if you wear them two sizes too large).

3. Nutella. On toast. On bagels. On tortillas. On a butterknife. On your finger. In a box. With a fox. On a train. In the rain. When I die I want to be buried with a tub of Nutella.

4. I'd rather spend the $6 that it costs to eat at Panda Express than spend an hour deep frying chicken chunks, coating them in sauce, and making fried rice from scratch. Another lesson learned the hard way.

5. An easy way to become fluent in conversational Japanese is to watch the entire first season of Heroes in one week.

6. I guess I'm going through an Asian phase, because I also read a book called Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet and really enjoyed it. It's about a little Chinese American boy who falls in love with a little Japanese American girl and then she gets sent to an internment camp because it was World War II and in times of war the Constitution can be thrown out the window. Wait...what?!

7. According to my calculations, I go through an Asian phase once every ten years.

8. Thirty is over the hill. At least, according to the bouquet of black balloons my loving mother brought to me it is.

8. Being thirty isn't that different from being twenty-nine, except that you feel really old and you start to see crow's feet and your kids start shopping around for rest homes, despite the fact that you are obviously wearing skinny jeans and there is no possible way that you are in your thirties.

Well, that's it. Those are my discoveries. Maybe I'll think up some more tomorrow.

I love you guys! Thanks for thirty awesome years!