happy birthday

Hey, it's my birthday! Seeing as I'm working as a temp and I've only been there for 5 days now, I think it will be a fairly anonymous birthday out of the house unless I call my friends on campus and announce it. And that's kind of, eh. Most of my good friends from campus are hardly ever on campus anymore and I'm not in the mood to round up a half hearted not well known posse of birthday support. I have been assured that I will be made a nice dinner and given chocolatey cake when I get home though. This is good. And tomorrow's Friday, which means one whole week of fulltime work under my belt. Also good.

I'm no stranger to the "new kid" birthday phenomenon. In primary school, there were many years when I had some well intentioned teacher who would organize a birthday calendar or board but by the time they were able to get around to it, all of us September kids' birthdays had passed. On my 18th birthday, I had my first day (post orientation) at my first remotely adult job as a unit secretary on a surgical inpatient unit, then I went home to my dorm where birthdays hadn't even come up yet (the kids were still quite absorbed in that heady early period where they engage in flirtatious/competitive comparisons of SAT scores, class rankings, high school social inventories, and stories about trips overseas).

Who else has this birthday?
Bell Hooks
Shel Silverstein
Barbara Walters
William Faulkner
Also, Will Smith, Michael Douglas, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Christopher Reeve, and Heather Locklear.


* = I'm not age-phobic. Everyone who lives long enough to get old will live long enough for their bodies to let them down in the most primal ways - e.g., no taking for granted that you can move yourself around with or without assistance. Mine body has already started and so I have had a preview of this process. In case you were wondering, yes, it sucks.

cranky

The cat woke me up at 5:30 (a half hour before my alarm was set to go off) for food. He's been crying on and off throughout the night most nights these days. So up I got, and stumbled out to the kitchen. I bent down to get a can of cat food from a low shelf and smacked my head off the corner of the counter.

My day followed in a similar vein at work. No injuries, but it was not a good day. Lots of fuckery, some preventable and some not. The latter I can accept with some grace. The former however, tends to push my buttons, especially on a day that started out as unpleasantly as this one did.

Today was my last official day at work, and I don't have a job or even an interview.

My siblings, who were both just down for my sister's birthday, are both cranky right now too. And my fella's in some kind of semi-depressed or possibly sick state so he's sleeping a lot and feeling like shit.

On the plus side, I've never been a fan of July. Aside from my sister's birthday, the month generally is one of my less favorites. Too hot and lots of stagnation. So this July sucking already, well, it's not like it's wrecking a month I love and that's a little sliver of a bright side.

birthdays

It's the fourth of July. For me this means two things. There's the whole holiday, fireworks, barbecue, etc thing but more importantly, it means my sister's birthday.

Yes, my sister is a yankee doodle child, but only by an accident of biology. If you imagine the kind of person who would love the idea of being born on July fourth, someone who would wear red, white, and blue, who would want a cake dripping with patriotic frosting buntings, who would jump around doing a sparkler dance in the evening while singing patriotic tunes and wearing a straw hat decked with stars and stripes, then you are imagining someone who is largely the opposite of my sister.

Aside from AM's not terribly patriotastic disposition, there was also the fact that our dad was firmly against allowing us to attend any parades or fireworks. Thus, for me the fourth of July has a weaker association with the national holiday than it does with AM's birthday and AM's birthday tastes. So here's what I think of as we near July fourth.

AM liked chinese restaurants, especially the kinds with ornately carved dragons and red fringed laterns. I say "liked" but I think actually this still applies. (My use of past tense is simply because I am speaking of the conditions of our childhood, the ones which shaped my associations with this date.) And indeed, this year I was thinking we could order chinese food. Or maybe I should make some kind of sweet and sour dish with rice. Or a sesame noodle thing. Chinese food and such dishes have featured prominently in my plans for her birthday since becoming an adult. When we were kids, AM's birthday celebrations often included going to a pond or lake with a group of kids. We should find somewhere to swim, I find myself thinking when considering how to celebrate her birthday. Other memorable AM birthdays included the sundae party and a tie-dye party (clearly this was in the late 70s or very early 80s). These condition my up to now unexamined belief that I must get ice cream and perhaps plan some crafts on her birthday.

My brother was born late in November. His birthday usually falls within a week of Thanksgiving, sometimes on the actual day. Needless to say, T____ has had many a turkey birthday cake. Other than a turkey shaped cake, T's birthday wasn't necessarily associated with any food in particular, probably because there is so much cooking going on around it that we just didn't establish a set meal or type of meal for the birthday proper. When his birthday comes around, I (usually) suppress the perverse desire to order him a turkey cake since as an adult, T has forbidden turkey birthday cakes, opting instead for a standard birthday cake decorated with frosting flowers in "autumn colors".

My own birthday is near a set of Jewish holidays. My family's not Jewish, which is good for my birthday I think because of the two holidays my birthday falls near or on, one involves a fast and the other involves gefilte fish.

So it's my sister's birthday and my sibs are both coming down tomorrow so we can celebrate. I'm off to go plan meals and order unpatriotic cake and whatnot. Assuming one can order any cake, let alone an unpatriotic one, on the fourth of July.