Every year, I celebrate my birthday over the Thanksgiving holiday. This means that the celebrations span a glorious stretch of days filled with delicious foods and general physical laziness. In addition to a great big turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, etc., I also get to enjoy a birthday cake and a special birthday dinner request. This year, I wasn’t able to make it home to LA for the holidays, but I did spend it with Jacob’s family at his grandparents’ home in Ellensburg. I was incredibly sick with a cold, so I was totally that cool gross girlfriend every handsome guy wants to bring to his family’s Thanksgiving dinner… >.< ! But despite all my mouth-breathing and nose-blowing, I enjoyed spending time with them and I am pretty sure his family enjoyed my company as well :^) His grandpa has the same exact birthday as me, and as I celebrated turning 28, he celebrated turning 82! We played Carcassonne, his mom baked me a chocolate cake from scratch, and we had a pizza party with pink champagne :^)
Jacob and I drove home on Saturday, and I slept all that afternoon. When I woke up, I felt rejuvenated enough to celebrate my birthday with my best friends up here in Seattle. These beautiful people threw me a party in their awesome apartment, and Jacob bought me cake, chocolates, and a slice of my favorite pizza. We played music and games, and I got a little more drunk than I was planning to, but that’s ok. It was my birthday party, after all! The next morning, Jacob and I got some dim sum, and I could not have asked for a better week-long birthday celebration!
Turning 28… feels alright, so far. I don’t exactly feel older… but since my birthday, I’ve had this feeling of giving less of a fuck about things that don’t really matter. Not sure if this is because I have a cold, or if it will be a defining theme in the last years of my 20’s… but I decided… I’m just not going to make myself feel so bad anymore. It’s wasted energy to feel guilty for things I can’t really control. It’s wasted energy to feel envious of material things. It’s wasted energy to imagine how things could’ve or should’ve gone. Though these feelings will occur throughout my life, I just can’t get too hung up on them anymore.
You know, the morning of my birthday, when I woke up super duper sick, I cursed my existence and stomped around… I regretted saying, “God damn it, another shitty year” as soon as I said it. I always feel weird about my birthday because I have this twisted fear that this will be the year everyone realizes I don’t deserve it. I fear that everyone will realize that I’m just a big fat failure who is still hung up on things that happened in the past, and will never be able to forge ahead into the future. But this year, I resolved to really change my attitude. I can’t keep thinking like that. I just can’t. There’s more to do in life, simple as that. I need to keep going, to make things happen. I can’t get myself stuck.
