Yesterday I celebrated my 43d birthday. That sounds like it’s such a big number, but for me it's just that – a number and nothing more. I don’t feel 43. I don’t know how 43 must feel. I might not even look 43. I’m definitely not your average 43-year-old person. I don’t have a husband or children. I have my own small language school, where I teach English along with my aunt. And just like twenty years ago I still have the same dream: to be a successful published author one day. Hopefully, an internationally recognised one! Anyway, we didn’t have anything special planned. We don’t celebrate birthdays anymore unless we all happen to be free on the same day and at the same time. For example, last year we were all free in the first half of the day and so we went to have a birthday lunch in “Хінкальня”, which is a local family restaurant with delicious Georgian food. This year we were much too busy for that. So we didn’t plan anything at all. It was just a chill day and I simply enjoyed every moment of it. It was really very nice to receive messages, calls, greetings, flowers, gifts, and treats from different people all day long. It was nice to be noticed. I think the very first person to leave a birthday message with a Lenny Kravitz song on my FB page was an old family acquaintance. Then there was another birthday message from a student. They kept pouring in all day long from different countries and social media sites: Facebook, Instagram, Telegram, Viber. Two students of mine wrote what I consider to be the longest birthday greetings ever (until proven otherwise)! I was flabbergasted, flattered, and absolutely moved by their ingenuity and touching words. The only place where my birthday went completely unacknowledged was Twitter. In the past there was a strong writing community there and I had a bunch of writing friends among self-published and indie published authors. We used to have fun, exchanging daily messages and helping each other to promote our self-published books. Nowadays Twitter is like a dead zone. Well, things change. My other slight disappointment was also book-related. I’ve been waiting to hear from my publisher about the release date of my book and I was sort of secretly hoping that it might be announced on my birthday. I just thought that it would be really cool. But, of course, it didn’t happen. I was glad that the weather was sunny and warm despite the weather forecast promising a grey day and that my sore throat (I had been dealing with it since Monday) had finally retreated. It was my usual work day, but it was a really good day and so I felt like writing about it.
