It’s Friday night and I have plans. Serious plans. Bottle of wine, blogging, Sox-Yankees game, telling myself not going to get sucked into watching Intervention on A&E again, but then watching it anyway only to cry harder than the last time, finally consoling myself by reorganizing my bureau kind-of-plans. Sorry there’s no talking me into going out to that awesome party or hot new restaurant at this point, because my night is spoken for.
This is my favorite kind of night. The kind I don’t have all that much of anymore - also the kind you don’t want too many of- not to insinuate that the Fridays of my life are always jam-pack with madness, hilarity and shenanigans. Just that there’s always “stuff” going on. Especially since I’ve mostly adapted to living my life in congruity with another person’s, so that hopefully when this other person and I get are wed in holy matrimony our worlds won’t seem so far apart. And this other person? Has a whoooole lot more friends than me. Which is why the occasional wine-addled, Invention-fueled weep-fest feels really good, especially when there’s no one else around to judge my tastes in guilty-pleasure music (White Snake, anyone?).
The only thing different about tonight is that in three hours it will be my birthday. And here’s the truth: I hate my birthday. However, I freaking love other people’s birthdays. I live for other people’s birthdays, they encapsulate everything I love about life: cupcakes, merriment, inebriants, singing and, most of all, greeting cards. But my own birthday fills me with about as much excitement as going to have my lady-bits examined -- wherein, “excitement” is replaced with “fear and loathing”. When it comes to my birthday, can’t we just not and say we did?
Birthdays, at least in my admittedly-warped mind, seem to be a yard-stick of a person. It’s the one, designated day a year that’s a celebration of your individual personhood. Not Jesus. Not the Easter Bunny. Not the American Flag or our fallen soldiers or Christopher Columbus. Just You. And so I make a fuss over my loved ones birthdays’ under the notion that even if I’ve failed to make it clear how much I love them on every other ordinary day of the year, daggummit, I will not fail on the one day it “counts”.
And when it boils down to it, isn’t that all anyone really wants? Just to “count”. It must be the human condition, not just my own, to innately fear that somehow we won’t. My birthday has become this looming symbol of self-doubt that’s wrapped up a lot of my insecurities into one neatly wrapped package with a bow on top. Birthdays aren’t about being the center of the entire universe, but maybe of the itty-bitty one we each inhabit, just for a day? Last year, none of my own, independent friends came to my birthday party. The year before I cried alone in my room with a broken heart. Those, and many other, nicks to the ego have sharpened my wince-instinct whenever the end of April rolls around.
But yet every year, without fail, a lot of super cool people show me mounds of gracious and humbling love on my birthday. There is a man who excels at such gratuitous displays. And I am marrying him. I know! It’s like winning the lottery. Everyday. My birthday is superfluous at this point.
Tomorrow I turn twenty-five. That’s all. I have to study for my Securities Regulation final most of the day. So it goes. This year, my birthday resolution is not to keep score, not tomorrow, not any year. Sometimes there’s cake, sometimes there’s presents, there are always a few disappointments. I’m going to put that in my pipe and smoke it ::cough, cough::
Time now to cheer the Red Sox win, turn the stereo up a little louder, pour myself another glass of Pinot Noir and toast to the waning hours of being twenty-four. It has been real.
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