My birthday's in less than a month now. I think I may be getting to dislike birthdays. I suppose most of mine have been about average, if you consider the fact that I only ever had one kid's birthday party in my entire life.
In retrospect, it was a stupid idea, because it wasn't really that much fun. I've never liked parties much, and I don't know what to do at them. By the next year I was no longer friends with any of the girls invited. But, remembering how it actually was, I wanted it because I was turning twelve and by God I was going to be like "normal" kids or die. By the next year, I was over that, but 7th grade was rough. Funny, really, because in sixth and seventh grade I was the popular kids. By eighth I'd settled into my niche with the rest of the brilliant weirdos. It's that stereotype that doesn't have a stereotype: kinda like Princess Mia from The Princess Diaries. I only saw the movie once, but you know what I mean- the nice, quirky kids who aren't nerdy enough to be nerds, aren't depressed enough to be emo (such as it was in 1998), and don't listen to the right music to be punks. Still, I was much happier then than ever I was when I didn't realise I was popular.
Back to birthdays, though. I am continually disappointed becase as far as I'm concerned, your birthday ought to be your own personal national holiday. Seriously, I'd love to work for a company who said, "yeah, you can have your birthday off." A birthday should be an opportunity for you to celebrate being you, and to remember who you are, where you came from and where you're going. You should at least be able to get into the movies for free on your birthday. There should be perks.
Smoking, drinking, driving, gambling and adult entertainment, for me, were never perks. They were all things that I wouldn't really want to do in the first place, why would I want to have a birthday to cement that fact in place? Three out of the five are still things I've never even attempted (make your own guesses).
Like I say, it's been good, but never what I expected. Much like The Boy with Christmas. Part of the problem comes from the fact that, while it isn't, my birthday is incredibly close to Christmas, and my mother always said it was nearly impossible to get me birthday presents after I'd already gotten every feasible thing from my Christmas list (ponies, puppies, and certain things that just plain didn't exist in nature were always out, but I kept putting them on). Also with that was my disappointment with how close my birthday is to Valentine's Day. Some of my teachers used to beg that I not bring anything in for school because the holiday party was generally in the same week. Of course, now that's practically illegal in schools, but at the time, everyone did it. One of my teachers even devoted the last week of class for anyone who had a birthday over the summer.
Besides, in elementary school you're not doing much the last week anyway. We spent a lot of time cleaning out desks, lockers, the teacher's closets, having the school relays, and watching movies, not to mention the annual "Death March to the State Fair Grounds" field trip that happened on the very last day of school. My first elementary school was about ten blocks from the fairgrounds, and so they'd walk the whole school (1-5, Kindergarten wasn't all day) all the way there, stay there for the day, and then walk all the way back. The walk back was pretty bad, especially in first grade because we were all so exhausted and it was something like 80 degrees already (first week of June) that we all collapsed on the floor of our un-air-conditioned classroom unable to move for close to twenty minutes. And then some of us had to walk home afterwards!
Boy, is this an entry full of tangents. What was I talking about? Birthdays, right. For this year, I would love, love, love to go somewhere and do something. It falls near the weekend this year, and I would just love to be able to, I don't know, go to Chicago, or St. Louis or someplace (out of the country is out, I've never changed my name on my passport), and do something fun. But, I guess there's a show that weekend, and it's bound to be cold (if nuclear winter hasn't set in by then, we can probably just kiss summer good bye and embrace Al Gore's Global Warming film), and one requires money to go places and do things.
Still, one can dream.