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How I Spent My 25th Birthday

xxoliviarussellxx
Feb 23, 2015
3 min read

Hey!

So this blog hasn’t seen some action in about a week. As some of you may already know, February 19, was my 25th birthday! I am now a quarter of a century old! It’s hard to not freak out when the internet is full of people accomplishing super amazing things by my age like saving the planet or running large conglomerate companies and the biggest accomplishment I have to look forward to over the next 12 months is graduating with my Master’s degree, but I’m trying to keep everything in perspective. I still want to push myself to do more, but I’m not going to beat myself up over what I haven’t done just because someone else did it.

So to celebrate this new milestone in my life, I travelled to Miami for my birthday. Ideally, I would’ve loved to go ANYWHERE but Miami. Don’t get me wrong Floridians, but after living in Florida for 2 ½ years, I was ready to stretch my wings and really see the world. So what’s so special in Florida you ask?

This guy, that’s who.

I’ve kept this relationship a secret until we could meet in person. We’ve been dating since Thanksgiving, and met on the dating website, OKCupid. He’s a great guy and I won’t go any further into details, so just know that we’re very happy.

I kicked off my birthday in one of my all time favourite restaurants, IHOP and enjoyed a deliciously sweet plate of Raspberry White Chocolate Chip Pancakes with egg whites, turkey bacon and hash browns on the side. He got the New York Cheesecake Pancakes with the same side. Although he claims to prefer Denny’s, I think I’m converting him.

Actually as I looked through the photos on my camera, I realised that almost all of them were of food. Because the next day we went to a Japanese Buffet (he knows me so well) called Shinju in Pembroke Pines. And it was amazing! I has sushi galore and even tried octopus for the first time. It was really good. Extremely rubbery and chewy though, similar to conch. But I would definitely eat it again. There were other things on my plate and I couldn’t remember the name of it but I was happy to eat all of it! I almost died when I found the green tea ice cream! Things got really funny, when I found two strands of hair in my carrot cake and a tiny green fly! The manager looked at it, and actually said, “Oh this is definitely an outside fly, the flies in the kitchen don’t look anything like this.” I couldn’t even be angry because everyone at the table was struggling to keep a straight face.

Then on Saturday, we went to Bonefish Grill in Ft. Lauderdale. It was a nice restaurant, I liked the dishes and it was clean. But I would not go back. I had a Blackberry Sangria while he had a Lemon Martini. While the food was good, the appetizer (a mere two crab cakes) costs more than my main dish, and my main dish was rather salty. I ordered the Basil Pasta and he got some sort of Chinese dish. I appreciate the seasonings used, but it could’ve been less salty. Out of all the food we ate, can you believe I only gained one pound? I still feel extra pudgy from eating so much though. So it’s gonna be some work to get back into my old routine.

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Now that I’m back, I’d like to share with you what I learned. The key thing about long distance relationships and well, any relationship is not sex, or money or any of that other shallow stuff. Any relationship can be successful with proper communication. Fighting is inevitable in a relationship, but the people involved should never stop communicating. Without proper communication, I don’t know how any couple could even think about the other stuff. But I also want to state that there is no absolute textbook definition of what proper communication looks like. Every couple communicates differently, and it’s up to each couple to discover their own unique language. I really am grateful to him for making my birthday so special, and I’m glad that I get to share this experience with you as well.