On the twenty-ninth, I made some pizzas and celebrated a birthday with some friends. One of those friends recently started bringing a game to birthday get-togethers. They call “Birthday Hotseat”. It’s a set of questions, hand-selected for the person celebrating their birthday. They have to answer the question, and then can pose the same question to anyone else in attendance.

There were nine questions in total. Her are answers to six out of the nine questions.

  1. “Favourite movie + one-line summary”
    My Letterboxd “Four Favourites” right now are The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Frances Ha, and Princess Mononoke. That night, I answered The Grand Budapest Hotel, which kind of stands in for Wes Anderson as a whole in that list. My one-line summary was: “A man teaches a lobby boy to love a hotel”.

  2. “Alternative career choice?”
    Assuming that I’d be adequate at it, I think I’d be a musician, maybe specifically a composer.

  3. “Name of your next blog post?”
    My answer at the time was that I was thinking of resurrecting a scrapped post entitled The H*cksite, about my appreciation for the website formally known as Twitter. I guess it’s this one instead. The “name” of this blog post is “Hotseat”.

  4. “When did you realize that you didn’t know how to swim?”
    This question came from my friend’s dad. I’ve known their dad to always be thinking on a deeper conversational level than most. I tried to understand what the deeper meaning to this question was, and had to settle for sharing that beginning counselling in the last year was, in some metaphorical way, admitting that I couldn’t swim on my own. I later found out that the question was meant literally. I wouldn’t have known that answer.

  5. “Which album would be the soundtrack to a movie about you?”
    If I could pick one song for a montage, it would be The Beach Boys’ Let’s Go Away for a While. To ask for Pet Sounds as an album, one of the greatest ever, to soundtrack a movie about me seems a bit much. So, if I have to pick an album, I think maybe Light Upon the Lake by Whitney could work.

  6. “What is your highest level skill?”
    One of my few talents is being able to recognize a song playing in the background of a noisy coffee shop or party.

“Who has been the most influential person in your life in the last year?”

“What’s your favourite quality about yourself?”

“What is love (in your words)?”