Birthday

I turned 20 in December. I didn’t really think it was a big deal, but apparently it is for some reason. Why, though? What does it mean really? That the earth has revolved around the sun exactly twenty times since I was forcibly expelled from my mother’s womb. Big deal. It’s not like I grew or matured in any appreciable way from the night before. It’s such a meaningless landmark. It would make a lot more sense to me if birthdays were scrapped and we celebrated more concrete achievements and signs of maturation. Like the first time I rode a bike without training wheels or when my pubic hair began to sprout. These are real monuments to aging, not silly things like an arbitrary calendar.

I didn’t have a birthday party, but one of my friends had a birthday on the same day so I went to his party. I didn’t think it was a big deal, but apparently this is the saddest thing in the world. At the party I would tell people that it was my birthday too, and they’d say “What? But—but why are you here? You should be—you should be—” everyone looked like they were about to cry. I didn’t get it. I think they all thought less of me after they heard, it was like I just told them I had leprosy. “You have leprosy? Why are you here? You should be in a clinic!”

I spent most of the evening trying to envision something more pathetic than going to someone else’s birthday party on one’s own birthday, and I came up with only one: if my parents had attended my friend’s birthday party rather than my own. I think that would have been pretty bad.

So anyway, I decided that I needed to do something to regain my social standing. Luckily my roommate’s birthday was only a week or so after mine, so I spearheaded a surprise party, and I had streamers and decorations in our room and a cake and he was shocked when he saw the party and then he was even more surprised when he found out the party was for me. So it worked out great.

He’s studying in London second semester, so I even threw myself a going-away party, it was great. He’s kind of mad at me, he won’t talk to me anymore. But nobody really talks to him anymore. Loser.