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.