I woke up this morning with the words to Mike Doughty's "Janine" swirling through my head.

"If you were the Baltic sea and I were a china cup" -- with heavy strumming.

I always thought that I would marry a guitarist, someone who would twist me and words together through his strings. An adolescent fantasy that refuses to die, and here I am 39.

My husband got up early and AJ slept in, which gave me an hour to lie in bed reading Zadie Smith's On Beauty, which is hilarious. I've been alternating it with chapters of Forster's Howard's End on which it is based, much the way Cunningham�s The Hours was based on Mrs. Dalloway. I'm not as big a fan of Forster as of Woolf, but On Beauty is smart and thoughtful and very, very funny.

AJ came in late to catch the end of our Sunday morning ritual of watching Little Bill on TV. The boys then brought me breakfast and birthday cards and a pink flower in a bottle. AJ was so excited about the presents, which we usually do in the evening after cake, that we decided to open a few early.

The first two packages were from my parents and included some equipment for water aerobics. The third package was from my brother and contained an evening bag from Viet Nam in the shape of a fish and covered in tiny glass beads (it looks something like the one in this picture, but nicer) as well as a wealth of exotic treats from his Asian travels: a large packet of loose tea from Sri Lanka, coffee beans from Indonesia, sweet and chewy preserved banana candies from a store down the street from my brother's house in Thailand, and a jar of tamarind candies from Laos that are a puzzling and fascinating and strangely addictive combination of sweet and sour and salty and hot, something like Southern-style iced tea with a hefty dose of cayenne pepper and a pinch of salt. The latter are described on the jar as "chewy and gummy." I wonder if I can tell the difference between the two.

After the adults had tried the candies and AJ had refused them -- they looked a little too exotic for his Spartan tastes -- AJ declared that we should save the rest until later. "We'll open them after the cake, like at most parties." And so be it. The prince has spoken. And there will be cake and more presents after dinner, although I�m already feeling thoroughly spoiled. This is due in no small part to the many of you readers who have left me birthday wishes. Thank you so much. This birthday is feeling much less onerous. Now I can start worrying about the next one.

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