Dress shopping and birthday plans

There is no way to measure the amount of hatred I harbor in my heart toward malls. I didn't realize it when I walked into Macy's today, but it is officially prom dress season and every spoiled teenage girl in Contra Costa County is ready to throw 'bows if someone gets in the way of the dress she wants. I was literally eying racks of dresses and plotting my route ahead of time to avoid having to play tug-of-war with a hanger if one of them cut in front of me.



Here's the deal: I'm turning 24 on Saturday. It's a little depressing and disconcerting, but I've decided to embrace my age by not wearing black on the day of my birthday. The dress above was exactly what I wanted, but I fought the urge to buy it because I want to avoid continually buying black clothes. The cocktail dress I DID end up with is bright, satiny and glamorous. It's not something I would ever wear if it weren't my birthday, and for that reason it is perfect :)

Saturday we're starting with dinner at Bistro Aix in the Marina District of San Francisco, which happens to be where I celebrated my 21st birthday. It's a small party (about 12 people) at an AWESOME restaurant because Brian and I are trying to save money for the Mexico cruise we're embarking on in two weeks. After dinner, we're going to hit up the Blue Light bar on Union Street to begin our bar hopping extravaganza. I'm planning to invite all my friends for the bar crawl portion, so I'll have to send out a MySpace bulletin or two to advertise. If you're interested in attending, please let me know. The more the merrier!

In the meantime, I've got a lot of spring cleaning to attend to in this little house. I already did the first of what will inevitably be many "closet purges," but I'm waiting until this second round to finally haul all the donation bins over to Goodwill. I also have to talk to my mom about how many of my clothes would be good to send to younger relatives in the Philippines. Most of my cousins are tiny little things, so I'm not sure that my clothes would even fit them :)

In any case, here's to my last week as a 23-year-old!