The girls of apartment 5 are strange and now I am 20-years-old

I'm lying on my living room floor.  I thought turning 20 would mean that I would be mature and stuff.  But when my roommates came out of the kitchen with a bucket of ice cream with a single Spiderman candle burning in it, I resigned myself to the fact that it probably wasn't true.

We girls of apartment 5 are a strange breed.  When I fell off the couch and inquired of the universe why I was such a catastrophe, Katrina answered in unconsoling mis-translated Arabic and then we looked at pictures of puppies on the internet and Fathme chimed in three-quarters of the way through our conversation singing happy birthday in Arabic, and Stephanie cooed at the cats outside the window.  I think.  Maybe they made it into our apartment this time.  Or maybe they are on skype.

We watch bad, pirated movies and I keep up my obnoxious habit of disbelieving all cinematic works loudly from my perch on the couch.  We don't wash our dishes that often, and since there's not that much of our semester left we never cook anymore, because why cook when you can go out for mansaf every other night?

I write a lot about my fabulous adventures out and about in the world, but the truth is that some of the things I enjoy the most happen right here in apartment 5 with Katrina and Stephanie and Fathme.  Somehow we went from four awkward girls sitting around a table making strained conversation while we had no internet to the mess of friendship and dirty dishes we are right now.

Fathme made me pizza today.  I turned on the oven though, since I am the only one not afraid of our oven.  And Stephanie borrowed my markers to decorate the door to our apartment to say "Happy birthday Elika!", and I woke up this morning to find that Katrina had taped napkins to the walls.

This was a good birthday.  With homemade pizza and a kilo of strawberries and doing Arabic homework while watching a movie with my roommates.  Somehow, this ended up being a really good birthday.