Yesterday was my birthday. I turned 38 years old. I turned 35 on imdb.com. Neither of these milestones are particularly, uh... stoney but since I just spent the last half of the year whomping on cancer like it stole from me I suppose yesterday should have come with some kind of celebration. It didn't. Unless you find chicken tacos and carrot cake at home with your mother and sister a wild time. If that's the case then I have some tickets to a forensic accounting seminar you may be interested in. The part of me that beat cancer could still not manage to beat the part of me that finds big birthday celebrations by full grown adults moronic. Beyond the age of 21 and before the age of, I don't know, say 70 any big birthday celebration you have is really just a celebration of you not being so stupid as to accidentally kill yourself in a given year. Congrats on the big 2-9! Way to not succumb to that odd and still unexplained jungle rot you got while on vacation in Cambodia! Are you still claiming it wasn't a sex tour? Happy Birthday, you pervert!
Some of you read that last paragraph and thought, didn't I attend your birthday party just last year? Others are reading that last sentence and thinking - how come I didn't get an invite to your birthday party? The answer to both questions is it wasn't my birthday party. It was a party, thrown by my Lovely (persistent and sometimes overbearing) Girlfriend in my honor. It happened to fall on my birthday and she just happened to hang a "Happy Birthday" sign from the wall but I promise you - it was not a birthday party. And if you never heard about - it's because you weren't invited. My hypocrisy aside, a yearly birthday party for yourself when you reach adulthood is either one of two things. A cheap excuse to get hammered or a cheap cry for attention. This explains why I can vaguely remember drunkenly sobbing that nobody likes me during the waning moments of last years party.
A couple of facebook friends mentioned on their happy b-day posts to me that I had earned the right to truly whip it on this year. I guess that's true. I've never looked for a reason to tie one on but certainly I've got ample ammunition at this point. At the same time, I feel like that eventual celebration cannot truly happen until I get my official clean bill of health and anything else would be premature. And if you ladies know one thing about me it's that I am never, ever, prema-- ohhhhh, uhhhh, yeahhh. Sorry, that's really embarrassing. Give me a few minutes and then we can continue.
Okay. I'm all cleaned up and ready to finish this post. Like I was saying, the big cancer-free celebration will happen in 2012 and then each year after on the date of my final radiation treatment. Also, at the five year mark (the Rubicon for Hodgkin's patients) there will be another huge blowout. Those will be cancer celebrations, they will have their own date, separate from my birthday. Maybe I'll just go the route of the militant recovering addict I ran into years ago who claimed he was only thirteen. He was thirteen, he said, because that's how long ago it was that he beat alcohol and drugs. I didn't want to be the one to tell him he would have trouble passing for seventy-five since he had just shared his life story with me after I'd asked such a probing question like "I'm doing pretty good, how bout you?" while sitting down two tables away with my coffee and newspaper. I wonder if imdb.com will let me change my age to One-year old?
Some of you read that last paragraph and thought, didn't I attend your birthday party just last year? Others are reading that last sentence and thinking - how come I didn't get an invite to your birthday party? The answer to both questions is it wasn't my birthday party. It was a party, thrown by my Lovely (persistent and sometimes overbearing) Girlfriend in my honor. It happened to fall on my birthday and she just happened to hang a "Happy Birthday" sign from the wall but I promise you - it was not a birthday party. And if you never heard about - it's because you weren't invited. My hypocrisy aside, a yearly birthday party for yourself when you reach adulthood is either one of two things. A cheap excuse to get hammered or a cheap cry for attention. This explains why I can vaguely remember drunkenly sobbing that nobody likes me during the waning moments of last years party.
A couple of facebook friends mentioned on their happy b-day posts to me that I had earned the right to truly whip it on this year. I guess that's true. I've never looked for a reason to tie one on but certainly I've got ample ammunition at this point. At the same time, I feel like that eventual celebration cannot truly happen until I get my official clean bill of health and anything else would be premature. And if you ladies know one thing about me it's that I am never, ever, prema-- ohhhhh, uhhhh, yeahhh. Sorry, that's really embarrassing. Give me a few minutes and then we can continue.
Okay. I'm all cleaned up and ready to finish this post. Like I was saying, the big cancer-free celebration will happen in 2012 and then each year after on the date of my final radiation treatment. Also, at the five year mark (the Rubicon for Hodgkin's patients) there will be another huge blowout. Those will be cancer celebrations, they will have their own date, separate from my birthday. Maybe I'll just go the route of the militant recovering addict I ran into years ago who claimed he was only thirteen. He was thirteen, he said, because that's how long ago it was that he beat alcohol and drugs. I didn't want to be the one to tell him he would have trouble passing for seventy-five since he had just shared his life story with me after I'd asked such a probing question like "I'm doing pretty good, how bout you?" while sitting down two tables away with my coffee and newspaper. I wonder if imdb.com will let me change my age to One-year old?
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