There are times in which I want to be spoiled and lavished upon from the time I wake up to the time I go to bed. A Baz Luhrmann party, all my friends having the time of their lives, good times and great memories made to be remembered and reminisced upon until the following year. I get all the material crap that I’ve ever said I’ve wanted throughout the last year, whether it was legitimate want or I was simply being ironic, for good laughs. Everyone remembers the date, nothing bad occurs on the day, I don’t get upset, disappointed or frustrated by anything, and I’m left with a feeling that I simply do not deserve any of this.
It’s just an arbitrary day of the year that happens to coincide with the anniversary in which I was born.
The reality is that I have very low and tempered expectations for my birthdays in general, and frankly I’m kind of uncomfortable with any sort of efforts made to draw attention to myself, whether by myself or by anyone else. I appreciate any and all efforts anyone makes to acknowledge or do nice things for me, but when the day is over, I don’t really expect much, and tend to go through my birthdays with a sense of carefulness and hope that nothing goes wrong.
I guess a lifetime of birthdays being treated like no big deal within my family has engrained this sense that birthdays are truly no big deal to me. It’s like I feel like they’re not that important, but everyone else seems to treat their birthdays with a little more importance than I would, that I feel like I’m caught in the middle of how I feel like a birthday should be. But out of fear of being disappointed, I think I have a tendency to downplay and deflect much of the acknowledgment and attention that I get in regards to my own birthday.
Do I want things? Sure, who doesn’t want presents? But I’m not one to receive things with no-strings attached, and I’ve always felt like people buying me shit is always something of an inconvenience to them, whether or not they’ll fess up to it. Besides, this year, not a single person asked if I wanted anything, so I don’t particularly have any expectations to receive anything.
Keep expectations low, and it’s difficult to be disappointed.
But sometimes it’s inevitable. I actually had a pretty grandiose plan this year to do something I think I, and many, many people would have enjoyed, but when it fell through, I was tremendously disappointed, deflated and there was no plan B. I can say I’m astonished by the arbitrary greed and unwillingness particular companies seem to exhibit in the name of adhering to their money-making ways, but I’m really not. I’m just more disheartened at just how difficult it is to plan a party these days.
Whatever though. At this point, I’m just kind of rambling, I had an idea in my mind that I wanted to write something on my birthday, but save for the first 2-3 paragraphs, I really had no clue what else I was going to write. Honestly, I don’t really have any expectations anymore. I just want to get through the work day with minimal frustration, have a decent dinner and watch some tv or a movie to wind the day down. It’s just a birthday, and it shouldn’t really a big deal, to me, much less anyone else, regardless of what unspoken shit swirls around in the back of my mind.
