I know that I don’t really make much to do about my birthday in the first place, but is it too much to ask to at least not be saddled with a vicious virus on my actual birthday?  Because that’s exactly what happened to me this year, where I spent my entire birthday clouded with brain fog, mostly in bed, barely eating, a trip to urgent care, and still on the hook for some daily obligations.

I went to Starbucks to get at least one treat for myself, since those cocksuckers only give you the actual date of your birthday to redeem a free drink, and they messed it up, giving me a smaller size than I had ordered, and since I was in the drive-thru, I was unwilling to clog the line and wait longer than I already had for them to remake something that wasn’t even going to taste like what I hoped it would, on account of being ill.

The adults in my home had already arranged for me to sleep in on my birthday, but for it to have become mandatory on account of the fact that I was hit pretty hard by this bug wasn’t exactly the way I had hoped it would go.  I know it’s futile to wax poetic about the fairness of life, but to get really sick on one’s birthday is definitely one of those things that just doesn’t seem fair at all.

I just wanted to sleep in, perhaps go for a jog while the weather was nice, go on a mini adventure picking up what very few and scant free shit items that are still offered up these days, and come home, spend some time with my kids, perhaps go get burritos for lunch, and then watch Wrestlemania day 2 in relative peace and health.

Instead, I wake up feeling like a bowling ball is embedded in my head, I can’t breathe through my nose from all the gunk trapped in there, and I can’t think straight at all.  I’ve got chills which means I’m fevering up, and it’s going to take a minute for the acetaminophen to help break it.  My kids, my perfect little children, come to bring me breakfast and coffee in bed and I love them so much, but I feel like shit that I can’t really reciprocate.  Eating feels like a chore and nothing feels like its sitting right, and I can hardly will myself to do anything but lay down and occasionally rotate sides, with hopes that the gunky congestion in my head will gravitate toward the opposite side.

Needless to say, my birthday this year was a miserable ordeal, and I’m not so much putting it in writing because I expect any sort of sympathy, but so I can remember just how bad a birthday really can be, and what I hope for it to not be like in future years.  But it all really sucks that this was my birthday this year, because now I don’t have it to look forward to anymore, and can only look at it in hindsight with resentment and disgust at how shitty it was, and if there were every such a thing as a re-do, this would definitely be one that I’d like to really have one for.