Celebrate the passage of time
El fabuloso! I have a birthday coming up and I find it quite a daunting prospect. It is not that I hate birthdays…. I have come to dislike to some extent what my birthday has come to represent in my life. My friends have been trying for weeks to ‘muscle’ me into having a loud party, with lots of food, loud music, etc. on the weekend before the birthday. See, my birthday falls on a Wednesday… not exactly suitable for a celebration. In return there will be gifts and cards and well wishes and many phone calls on the day. Somehow it all seems so contrived. The alternative would be to do nothing at all. Just a quiet evening at home with the gf and that’s that. However, there is this nagging voice in the back of me head that tells me I need to celebrate, with my close friends… at least. Treating “my day” like it is any other day in the year just does not seem like the right thing to do. I am of course predisposed to do these types of things. I grew up in a household where birthdays are supposed to be a fabulous day where everything revolves around you. My mother insisted on it and if you knew what's good for you would not dare to cross swords with she-who-has-to-be-obeyed. It is New Year’s Day with you as the centre of attraction. But much like New Years Day, it rarely lives up to expectations. The night before there will be the obligatory dinner with the parents and the siblings. I think I may have mentioned before that my mother suffers from delusions of grandeur. Of course my parents will sigh and ask me when I am getting married. To which I will mumble and say something incoherent that they cannot understand. They will play the overused yet much-maligned guilt card about grandchildren and how they are not going to be around forever. A silly game of Tic-tac-toe. One of these days I am going to break it to them that marriage does not equate to children or vice versa, but I doubt they will see the logic in that. My sisters will be on my side in all of this, but only because they hate the gf and will tell me that I could do better. Haha… it somehow comes with being the younger son, I suppose. Since we are at dinner with the parents and I cannot exactly tell them to F&*K OFF and mind their own business, I will smile and steer the conversation away from me by questioning the one brother-in-law’s inability to hold down a job. So much fun - except for the "f-u-n" part. My brother will try once more to get me me to go into business for myself. He’ll tell me that I am wasting my life in the corporate world and that I can only realise my true potential by being my own boss. Whoo-bloody-hoo… I’ll remind him again that his dreams aren’t mine and he really should work on getting a life of his own. Somehow my words will fall on deaf ears because he will bring it up again later in the evening. The only thing drier than the conversation will be the food that my mother would have spent all afternoon preparing in my kitchen. I sound pretty ungrateful I know, and there are many good things about my family that I appreciate immensely. You however have to spend an evening (especially on your birthday) with them to understand where I am coming from. Yep, I can’t wait! Thank God, there will be alcohol to make the evening bearable. I think I understand now why I desperately need a celebration party of my own. Salut!
