I didn’t have a good birthday this yea. These things happen, and I am not gonna let it get me down too much. If things go well for me, I will have a total of about 80 of them. The first five won’t be remembered, and the last ten may not be worth much of a fuck, so that gives me about 65 birthdays1. So if even a dozen of 65 or so are bad, that’s ok. At least it is for now. I might change my mind when I start to feel like I only have a dozen or so left.
So I will share with you two anecdotes and a thought around my birthday. These should be pretty short.
I got up on the morning of my birthday and had some errands to run. I left pretty early, and I got back in pretty early. As I was coming back to my apartment, some tourists in the airBnB next door were in the stairwell, having themselves a little wake and bake. There may have been a bit of judgement – it was a god damned Monday. Who’s doing a wake and bake on a Monday morning?
Until a couple of hours later. Work had been harassing me all day, and my day off turned into a remote day kinda working. At some point I complained about this to a friend, who told me that the only moral thing to do would be to get so drunk that I then couldn’t work.
It was only at that point that I wished I had maybe joined the tourists for that wake and bake. I have enough booze at home that I could have gotten myself going bright and early at 9am. Maybe I shouldn’t judge so quickly.
Anecdote 2, blessedly shorter:
The day after my birthday it was raining pretty hard. When I got into the office, hanging from the communal coat rack, were a pair of black pants.
I don’t understand this. I would imagine that if you come to the office with soaked pants, you would keep them on. Would you just hang them on a coat rack? Next to someone’s coat? Like you own the fucking place?
Thought: I didn’t mention my birthday to a lot of people, but I did mention it to one coworker. We ended up meeting up on my birthday and she got me a little gift bag of things. It was nice of her. And she shouldn’t have. Frankly, the beer she offered me at a nice bar was more than enough. Having a nice gossipy dinner afterwards was also nice. Being the only person I really like in the office is the nicest thing possible.
She shouldn’t have given me the gift bag. It was an obvious regift. The candy at the bottom of the bag had long gone stale. The novelty pen still had a little tag with her name on it. The bag leaned feminine.
I don’t want to be an asshole here. A gift is a gift. And as I mentioned above in the initial paragraph, I am grateful for this person just being a friend, and coming out with me on my birthday was also nice. She didn’t even have to throw in a gift.
I wasn’t expecting one one way or the other, and now I’m the asshole for not liking it.
1 I use this same reasoning when a person doesn’t want to try a new restaurants. Multiply meals per day by 365 by the amount of years you are statistically going to live. You will get a number ranging anywhere between 25k to 80k (mine is about 58k). How many of those can you toss away? Loads. Take a risk, try the durian pizza.
Locus Horribilis 