✨ birthday! feels good!

We've come a long way, baby.

Today is/was my birthday. 🎉

I enjoy birthdays. I like celebrating mine, I am always eager to toast yours.

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My best boss at Pixar taught me never to work on your birthday and for years I adhered to her wisdom. The past two birthdays I had to travel for work which added stress and distance from my kid; a stark contrast to 2020 when she and I were infamously isolated at home for my 40th.

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Been some really atypical years.

It's a real pleasure to report that 43 feels easy and grounded. And at home, by choice.

Inviting friends for happy hour is the most non-exceptional event, but it was the first in way too long and the first ever at this address. I looked around my living room and had one of those “this is your life” flashback montages. Felicia and I shared a cake on the coast of California on my 19th. Frances and I danced to a live jazz band on the steps of the UVA Rotunda for no. 22. Nick ran around San Francisco taking absurd photographs for my 27th (see below). Robb brought me balloons to brighten that bleak 40th; that night Frances, Jessi, and Felicia dined together on Zoom with the group that was supposed to be sharing one large table.

There were so many unbearably lonely days/weeks/months of the pandemic I don’t take a room full of friends for granted anymore.

At 8 o’clock everyone went on with the rest of their evenings and I treated myself to a solo night at the cabaret. Waiting in line I was greeted by a warm, familiar face; my old college friend Chris Kelly was also flying solo. We hadn’t seen each other in 20+ years!

Filed away in a box somewhere there are photos of us at the 2000 Millennium March on Washington…

Sounds so simple, but this year I’m grateful for people. For you.

📸 OLD SCHOOL

Friday night my friends debated (again) what to make of us generationally cuspy folks caught between Linklater’s Slacker and Millennial Pink. (For the record, I heartedly embrace both.) This is a frequent topic of conversation for those of us born in the 1979-1982 range. Where is the cutoff? Who are we?

I always proudly proclaim myself Xennial, emphasis on the X, but I’m also fond of NYT’s take on elder millennials:

Members of the Spice Girls generation are the only people in history to have both grown up with the internet and to retain childhood memories that predate it.

In a very Gen X dad move, I recently got sucked into a clickbaity Insider recap of a TikTok which proposed that Millennials are bad at posing because they (we?) were raised when taking a photo cost real money.

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We’re too precious, too risk-averse because buried in our subconscious is the memory of waiting hours/days only to get back a pack of unusable prints.

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Counter: we didn’t squander endless minutes of our day getting the perfect, but ultimately ephemeral, snap.

I thought about this differential while examining the albums from my 26th, 27th, and 28th birthday scavenger hunts. In those years I organized afternoon photo adventures for my friends. We would break into teams and frolic around San Francisco taking random pictures based on prompts: blue cocktail, evidence of pre-1906 house, street couch, hi-five a muni employee, cher (not a cd)…

After a few hours, everyone would return to home base and pass me their SD cards. While guests grabbed drinks and told tales from their afternoons, I copied over the pictures onto a central laptop and quickly worked to organize them by category. There were lots of peripherals and wires involved. Then we had a big celebratory slideshow and anyone who joined the party late would pick each prompt’s winner. It was the kind of day-long silliness one could only manage in their 20s without children. It felt new and technologically advanced with our pocket digital cameras—and now, hilariously old-fashioned.

The annual tradition went on hiatus while I was in grad school finals for birthdays 29 & 30, but I never revived it. I think because we all had smartphones by then.

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What seemed novel in 2006—go take pictures of everyday things—had fundamentally transformed by 2009. And as my phone camera got better, I carried my pocket Canon less and less. In hindsight, I should have spent my days in business school building a photo-sharing app; Instagram was introduced six months after I graduated (October 2010).

What is truly remarkable about the pictures from those years is how imperfect they are. No one is posing, not an influencer in sight. (Though, at least one future Oscar winner makes an appearance.) No hand signs, terrible lighting, red eye, and very few variations of the same scene. You captured the moment, you moved on.

🎂 WHAT WOULD DOLLY BAKE

Mama loves a licensing deal. Thank you: John, Leroy, and Ryan. ✨

🪩 THAT! FEELS GOOD!

You could go listen to this new Bebe Rexa x Dolly Parton collab…
but I’m writing this with the new Jessie Ware on repeat.
Summer music vibes start now.

You are a jewel baby… have a great week,
xx kyle

1. Send me your birthday to add to the calendar!

2. In 2020, while leaning out the window to clap for essential workers, you could not have convinced me that I would spend 41 in Yellow Springs and 42 at the Hollywood Bowl…

3. For the kids—we’re speaking of the actual dollars people spent developing and printing film negatives.

4. Hold on to this thought—I’ll be back to rant about Kodak’s APS format in a future newsletter.

5. The first iPhone model was released in June 2007.