Happy Birthday to Me

It's my birthday today, and somehow I seem to have never gotten over the part where you secretly hope that it will become a national holiday, complete with small-town parades, but without the traffic. Sigh. I think I've cried on my birthday every year that I've lived here, which is not a very national-holiday-like thing to do.

I'm not quite sure why birthdays are so emotional for me (or maybe I know and I'm not very proud of it). 364 days of the year I'm completely fine, and on August 27th I become the Princess and the Pea -- a day full of proverbial mattresses can scarcely mask the infinitesimal pea I've let under my skin. I think it's just that it's really important to me to be remembered. And every year, I manage to be quite skilled at getting hung up when a few people don't, and I wind up dissing the many who do, and who often go humblingly out of their way to do so. But now, on top of being bummed -- which I can usually talk myself out of with a quick reality check -- I wind up feeling like a Horrible Person, which is a harder inner-voice to talk smack to. Somewhere along the way the conflicted feelings and general frustration over the messiness of being human usually work their way out through my eyeballs, while my friends sit by in confusion as I have my annual meltdown minutes before the party begins.

At least I am nothing if not predictable.

I brake for OfficeMax

I'm actually drinking decaf coffee this week, for the first time in 28 years. It' s the stepford wife of the beverage world, all gloss and no soul. I can't decide if I'm just consoling myself for having to give up coffee again, or whether I'm trying to fool my body into squeezing out an extra drop of perkiness before it realizes it's been had. It's true, I never thought I'd hear myself say there's just no substite for a good night's sleep.

Things to do today, for those of you in the home audience:
-Give props to your favorite office supplies, maybe even name them. I am currently addicted to the Bic "Wite-out" device, which lays a thin strip of opaque white tape over my messes, and you don't even have to wait for it to dry, like the original and long-suffering (and probably revolutionary for its time) White-out (TM). My second-favorite thing here(though not an office supply, per se) is the motion detector copy machine, which turns itself on everytime I stick my head out of my cube.

-Start a discussion group. For starters, check out www.newpantagruel.com (I haven't read enough to know what I'll think of it, but I've checked out enough headlines to guess it will be thought-provoking, especially for folks who are mourning the demise of Re:generation Quarterly).

-See if Nancy at Online Psychic can guess your card on the first try: http://www.onlinepsychic.com/main/m_testread_c1.shtml. (fyi, she "guessed" mine... twice!! Spooky.)