It's my party, I can cry if I want to

*** warning: another post that seems to have degenerated into musing about adulthood and other non-perky subjects and may only be relevant to women in their 30s ***

Every year I cry on my birthday, and this year probably won't be an exception.

I've been feeling a little wallow-ey, so I just came home from work and devoured another chunk of Alli's "better than sex" cake (which is a very ambitious name for a cake that won't even hold me afterwards while I fall asleep). And I decided at the last minute to take tomorrow off of work, so I'm dreaming of the possibilities. I had a little bbq on Sunday and as the evening ended, I felt astoundingly... grateful for so much about my LA life. I wish I could hold onto that feeling all of the time, but hey, I'm human.

I had coffee last night with an old friend from Berkeley, and we were musing on the general joys and tribulations of growing up, and he reminded me of a quote from his sponsor: "it's all about learning to wear the big boy pants." They don't always fit and they feel more formal than I'd like to be and sometimes they chafe... but I guess you just keep walking. You learn the world is rarely fair, and that it's definitely not going to take a smoke break for your emotions. You learn that maybe, just maybe, feeling happy all the time is not a constitutional right. You realize that sometimes (though not all the time) the best thing you can do is just let yourself be lonely and not try so hard to fight it when you don't have the energy to spare. You start to suspect that your magic wand may be permanently on backorder. But there's room in the pants to grow into, and you also learn what's worth spending your energy on, or as a friend recently put it, that you're "too old for insecurities, flightiness, and uninteresting things." You start to believe that life's really too short to worry about your upper-arm fat. And you get better, a bit, at knowing what you want and saying no to the stuff (or people) that you don't.

Lately I am learning that I am capable of being very, very pissed off (yes, I wasn't really sure about that one... I'm usually very easygoing). I am also realizing, and it is not very fun, that I may have Issues with expressing anger, or at least expressing it towards the thing that's actually making me angry, and then I get angry with myself for acting like I'm not angry, and then before I know it I find myself getting off the phone with the thing that's making me angry and then, oh, say, calling up someone 1000 miles away to scream about how angry I am. Yes, I know this helps no one. And I'm confirming that because I don't really "do" anger well, it comes out as "sad," because that's really the only emotion I'm good at expressing, well, pretty much anywhere. So tomorrow could just be the day where everything going on in there, all the gratitude and anger and getting to talk to so many people I love all over the country, and everything else, just winds up coming out through my eyeballs.

I'll keep you posted.