Birthday

I had a birthday recently—seems like most people have one about every year or so. When I was a child I used to go all out (and by "I" I mean my mother) and have huge, elaborate parties. Medieval wars with marshmallow cannons and cardboard castles, outer-space explorations with aluminum helmets and edible aliens, sleepovers with no sleep. . .

Then I hit teenage-hood. I have a complex about getting older, I think the first time I cried on my birthday was when I was thirteen.  It's not that I had a phobia of wrinkles or that I wanted to stay a lame barely-teen for eternity. Crazy as it sounds, I just LOVED being thirteen so much. Guess you could say I had a happy childhood—minus birthdays.

The tearful birthday tradition continued. I cried when I turned fourteen, and fifteen, and sixteen. No parties, no celebrations—in my defense, I did not dress up in black and morn like something had just died (maybe just thought about it). By the time I hit twenty I'd gotten a little better control of myself. Looking back I am soooooo glad I did not freeze myself at the young age of fifteen or sixteen, even though at the time that was all I wanted. To be stuck as a fifteen-year-old for the rest of your life. Yuck.

Finally, my college breeding hit, at twenty-one (almost) I wasn't going to stop aging because I threw a fit, and that I had friends, and I decided to party it up. I invited everyone I knew to play games and eat cake, and that's exactly what we did. I think we had at least two or three different kinds of cake and ice-cream, youtube watching, and games.

Some people know when there is a good thing, and then they know when to stop so there's not too much of a good thing (yes, there can be too much of a good thing). I tend to go overboard. For my next birthday instead of just having a party I decided to do intense things. Not intense things like normal people might do, but intense things like a person like me would do.

On True Love

I think every little girl thinks she knows a lot about romance. . . and then every teenage girl knows she knows a lot about romance. . . and then those in their twenties realize how much they don't know about romance. . . and the vicious cycle continues on from there.

Then there are girls like me and my roommates, who choose to take what we call a "refreshing" look on dating and men.

Cats:

The thing to do if you are a relatively young single with no prospects is to become a cat lady. It is an age-old and well-respected tradition. Many have chosen and followed down this glorious path!

 . . . Yah.

Rollerblading

As a child I was not particularly clumsy, I took dance lessons and played sports, however I never really excelled at these things. I didn't learn to ride a bike until I was ten—and I only learned then because I was humiliated into it.  My younger brother had learned to ride a bike without training wheels—and no way was I going to be outdone by him.

My brother tried learning how to roller blade a few years later. This hobby I decided I did not need to learn.

This childhood decision never haunted me until I was a freshman in college.  All throughout my teenage years up to this point I had religiously avoided anything with wheels or skates that attached to my feet.  I had never been ice-skating, rollerblading, rollerskating, or even stood on a snowboard.  I'm not sure why I had such a passionate aversion to trying these things, but I did.  Of course the first time I decided to try rollerskating out it was with a large group of friends.  We all went to the rollerskating arena, we all got our skates, and we all set out to have a blast rolling around.  I think somehow in my mind I thought I would just magically be able to keep my balance, or perhaps I'd even discover that skating was one of my unknown talents and I'd be able to magically glide across the floor. —While this worked well in my mind, the skating did not actually work quite as immaculately in practice.

The Office: Living the Sitcom

I work in an office. Sometimes I think that I could just quit my job and make a sitcom—call it Another Office, or something lame and cheesy like that. Someone lectured me recently on the three things that make your work truly fulfilling, they are called the three Ps: Passion, Purpose, and People. I'm not sure about the first two, but the last one, we have. 

It may come as a shock to my friends, but at work I am a rather quiet almost mousy kind of person.  I think I would absolutely shock the people at work if they ever met me around my friends.  At work I am soft-spoken and quiet, I sit at my desk and type away at a keyboard. My co-workers do not know the real me, I have tried very furvently to hide it and think I am succeeding. —Such success likely means that everyone things I am shy and boring, but they are not suggesting that I should consider talking with a physiologist . . .

But, back to the sitcom.

My Knee: A History You Never Wanted to Read About

Seems like every person has a few bodily injuries they like to complain about—or at least pull out and tell stories about to people who really don't care and become less and less interested as the tale goes on. If you are likely to be one of those disinterested people then you may not be interested in the history of my knee, although I (like all those other inconsiderate, self-absorbed people you hear these stories from) will continue on in telling my story anyway.

The tragic tale of how I injured my leg begins when I was three—it is distressing because no three year old should be hurt and in pain, and less appalling because how I managed to maim myself was due to my tripping over a garden hose.  If there is not a fantastic story to go along with an injury, the injury becomes less and less interesting.

People only care if you're injury is entertaining . . . So I will try not to bore you with uninteresting back story.

The real story all began on a Friday afternoon.  I went to work, sat at a desk for long, music-marinated hours, drove home, and began cooking dinner at my apartment.  As I was standing around cooking potatoes, or green beans, or whatever it is I desired to cook that evening, my leg started to feel strange.  At first I ignored it—because this is what I do.  I have a working theory in my mind that if I pretend I am not hurt, then I am not.  I think this theory could probably be likened unto the ostrich theory—if they can't see the predator (because their head is stuck in the sand) then the predator can't see them (with their body sticking awkwardly out of the sand in plain view, just waiting to be eaten.)  You'd think after enough failures of this theory I would realize it should not continue on in its progression to become a law.  However, I am a slow learner.

A Tour Never to Forget

When I was a young and oblivious thirteen-year-old I was in a choir—which is a relatively normal kind of thing for a young teenager to do.  I wasn't particularly talented at singing, or reading music, and I was definitely on the young end of the choir, but when they decided to tour the USA they let me sign up just like everybody else.

My mother had a minor/major heart attack and . . . duh, duh, duh bought me a cell phone so I could be in constant contact. One of my few claims to fame in my family is owning a cell phone at thirteen—usually my parents start getting their children cell-phones around the time their children start driving.  Although I did have to deal with the awkward "brick" cell phone my family got for me.  Now days you can hardly get a phone that isn't a smart phone, I suppose the "brick" of now would be a flip phone.  The brick of my time as a thirteen-year-old was a small grey square that I immediately recognized was uncool.  I went through stages of thinking I was cool because I had a phone and realizing I was lame because my phone was not an icon of modernity.

Because I was young and obsessive and because my mother was my mother we bought every single item on my itinerary for the tour—which is weird, do not do this.  We also labeled every single thing we bought with my name (as we were instructed to do, and which probably no one else on the entire tour did). Every shirt, every pair of pants, my shoes, probably my underwear was labeled with my first and last name in permanent marker.  We were extreme in our preparation.