My B-Day. My Friends.

I really didn’t want a birthday. I wasn’t grumpy or depressed, really. It’s just – I was turning 26.

26. That’s over halfway to 50, ladies and gentlemen. That’s over halfway from 20 to 30. Looking past the numbers, I find myself noticing that my classmates are increasingly younger. It’s not that that I look down on them and think they’re immature. I just find myself remembering things in history they don’t: the Challenger disaster, the Gulf War in the early 90s, the entire Clinton presidency. I’m facing the fact that each day I am more of a relic, an icon of a past age.

Okay, so maybe I was a bit depressed.

But L wasn’t having anything to do with that. “Birthdays are important in my family,” she said. And with that, she gathered the crew. A quick explanation is in order here: I don’t have one monolithic mass of friends, in fact, many don’t know each other at all. Here at AUC, I have a multiple friendship spheres: study-abroad students – hailing from everywhere, from Pakistan to California; The Arabic Language Institute program here – mostly through my ex-roomie J; and I also have a batch of grad students friends, with the odd Egyptian thrown in, just because they’re cool.

Needless to say, it was strange to have them all show up on short notice to the swanky Don Quixote restaurant here in Zamalek, a place I’d been dying to go to from the first time I walked past. The only thing Spanish about the place was the name, by the way, and the prices were astronomical. Afterwards, a few of us went to Deals for late night socializing.

By the end of the night, I realized I was profoundly touched. When my Frankfurt-Cairo plane landed last August, I didn’t know a single soul from this disparate group. Now, they’re my friends. I think sometimes I take that for granted. I won’t anymore.