33.

thirty-three
adjective
1. Being three more than thirty. –Vocabulary.com¹
2. Being the number of years, minus two days, that the world has had to put up with me. – The Nut

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Monday is my thirty-third birthday.

*waits for chorus of enthusiastic applause to die down*

All right, all right, that’s quite enough of that. Everyone return to your seats and- okay who just popped that champagne cork? I’ve got my eye on you, buster. And I’m confiscating that champagne, for…research purposes. Yes, that’s it, research. Definitely.

I’ve been waiting to be thirty-three for, well, about thirty-three years now. Written numerically, it’s just my favorite number twinned, and you know how particular I am about my numbers. And since, barring any notably spectacular advances in medical science, it’s unlikely that I’ll be living to the even more numerically pleasing age of 333, this is my only chance to be such a lovely number with no pesky 4s or 8s or any of those other riff-raff cluttering it up, and I plan on enjoying every minute of it.

There’s also the fact that I used to be more than a little infatuated with the Smashing Pumpkins, and even though I’m pissed at Billy Corgan for the rebooted bastardization he’s currently operating under the same name, there’s no stopping the nostalgic joy that washes over me every time I hear the opening piano notes of Thirty-Three begin to play.

So it’s a good number, and I like it, and here’s how I imagine my year of 33-ness will go:

1. Win all the lotteries ever, somehow.
2. Use portion of winnings to invent a portable teleportation device, being very careful to include enough anti-fly precautions to not become a sci-fi cliché.
3. Use another portion of winnings to invent temporary cloning device.
4. Go on world cruise with Nutty Hubby, teleporting to embarkation port to avoid the whole annoying air travel thing.
5. Before leaving on cruise, create temporary clone of self. Send clone to office to hand in resignation and work until the Boss Lady can find a suitable replacement, because Boss Lady is nice and I don’t want to leave her high and dry just because I’m off stuffing my face on a giant floating buffet. Once task is fulfilled, clone ceases to exist.
6. See world. Try (and fail) to avoid making “I can show you the world…” Aladdin references.
7. Teleport home.
8. Buy large property in the mountains.
9. Build dream house on large property in the mountains.
10. Every morning, make snow angels and then go snowboarding.
11. Get tattoo.
12. Eat an entire black forest cake.
13. Get another tattoo.
14. Buy second property in York, England, because sometimes I really miss living there.
15. Teleport to York and spend several weeks enjoying Sunday carvery lunches, high tea, and pub quizzes.
16. Teleport to Stonehenge, because it’s been a while. Have Nutty Hubby recreate photo of me from when we were last there, the original of which I lost when my computer’s hard drive fried itself.
17. Go to Italy on a whim.
18. Visit all the places Nutty Hubby and I went to last time we were there, which I also lost all my photos of.
19. Use portion of lottery winnings to invent calorie-reducing ray gun (CRRG).
20. With help of CRRG, eat everything in Italy.
21. Regret not inventing CRRG before world cruise. Resolve to go on second world cruise with CRRG after finished with Europe.
22. Search for the pistachio Ferrero Rochers I stumbled across last time in Pisa, and this time try not to eat them all before I can get some home to my pistachio-loving mother.
23. Make short stop in France.
24. Buy ninja outfit at costume shop.
25. Don ninja costume and teleport briefly into the Louvre, appearing directly on top of the Mona Lisa’s bulletproof glass case. Pose for a few photos, then teleport back out again before security can get to me.
26. Buy copy of French newspaper containing article about the weird ninja incident.
27. Teleport back to Canadian mountain home, have article framed. Hang on wall.
28. Giggle.
29. Get another tattoo.
30. Decide cloning device is wildly unethical and destroy it.
31. Sleep soundly through the night, for once.
32. Wake up and realize that 1-31 was all a dream.
33. Dammit.

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Today’s blog post was brought to you by the letter T, the number 33, and the Nutty: Helping The World Make Less Sense Since 1983 Challenge, AKA the Blogging A to Z Challenge.

¹ “thirty-three” Vocabulary.com. Vocabulary.com, 2016. Web. 23 April 2016.