It's My Birthday!

I was born on 11-30 at 11:30PM.

Weird huh?

I've always been one of those people who has to celebrate my birthday in some way. I can't understand how some of my friends don't do anything for it anymore.

What sucks, is that now I'm getting to the age where birthday parties are more rare.  And I like birthday parties. I would always have a ton of kids, from school, church, and a few cousins maybe.

Since my birthday is in November, it's usually too cold to do anything outside. I've always hated that. What's worse, is that there's usually some snowstorm or the very first snow of the year on my birthday. Yuck.

When I was little my favorite colors were pink and yellow, so I just had to have a pink and yellow cake. So even now, I have a strawberry-banana swirled cake. I remember once the children at my party licked the pan clean. It's pretty tasty. That's basically the only remnant of my old parties unfortunately.

Since ninth grade I believe, I've just had a few friends go out to eat with me somewhere and we brought my pink and yellow cake along. It's nice, but I want something to last longer than an hour at a restaurant. When I was little my birthday used to last for 2 or 3 weeks it seemed like. Maybe that's just because it's between Thanksgiving and Christmas though. I've never understood why older people hate their birthdays, but I think it's all just a part of "birthday decay."

By "birthday decay" I mean the gradual decreasing excitement about birthdays. It's quite a sad thing for me. When we turned one, of course we weren't really excited about our birthdays, but I believe that's still when this excitement began. We'd get new little toys and lots of people would be around. By the time we're two we have a better understanding. I think the peak of this birthday-excitement scale is around 8 or 9. That's when kids really seem to get excited about everything. Not long after that, middle school begins. Your friends start to change, but you still have some fun birthday parties, but you aren't invited to everyone's that was in your class like you were before. Then high school comes. Your friends completely change, or you just aren't as close to people like you were before. That makes it hard to know who to invite, so you wind up having a small "party" by going out to eat. Lame. After that, you may get a few surprise parties, or maybe some big ones at age 30 or 50.

Although I didn't get a "sweet-sixteen" last year, I was fortunate enough to have a party this year, (much to my surprise). I had a surprise party in 8th grade as well; I thought I was going to my friend's house, and when I arrived all my friends were downstairs. This year, I was planning to go to Hu-Hot with a few friends. I wanted to have a party, I just never planned one. I always have trouble knowing who to invite; close friends only, friends-including older friends, people from church and school, or just school? It's sooo much easier if someone just does that for me so I don't have to worry about offending anyone if I'm not the one inviting them.

Anyway, me and Jared were supposed to meet everyone at Hu-Hot at 7. I wanted to get there a little bit early. I was begging him to leave, but he was standing in my house playing Bike Race while I was waiting in the car. I was so mad. Finally we left, and he drove 20 mph on a road we usually go 70 on. He had been driving like an old man lately, trying to get the best gas mileage possible, but this was crazy. He was accelerating ridiculously slow, in his MUSTANG. It was already about 7, and then he said, "Oh, I need to take this boy-scout popcorn to church quick and give it to Tom." I think I laughed out of anger. We went into my church and Jared stopped and looked in the elevator room. He was acting so weird. He just stood in there looking around. I made fun of him but he was just laughing. He was doing everything he could to make us late to my dinner-or so I thought. He saw a container with wedding tablecloths and wanted me to look at them. What a weirdo. I started walking toward the teen room and he said, "Jessie! Wait!" He grabbed me then suggested that we use the tablecloths right now and get married. He pretty much got down on one knee and proposed to me, JUST to waste some time. I was laughing, but I was still annoyed. Finally we walked to the teen room-almost. We were about 20 feet away from where we were supposed to drop off the popcorn, and Jared says, "Jessie, I have to pee really bad." Apparently we couldn't walk 20 more feet and drop of the popcorn first, we had to go to the other side of the church to the bathroom. Awesome. I rolled my eyes and waited for him. And waited. And waited. And waited. I yelled into the bathroom. And knocked on the door. And kicked the door once or twice. He just told me to wait. He washed his hands for about 2 minutes, spending about 10 minutes total in the bathroom. This was it. I was so mad that I couldn't even act mad anymore. He was probably playing Bike Race in there or something. Finally we began to walk back to the teen room to quickly drop off the popcorn. He was walking SO slow. Ugh. We were almost there and Tom came out and asked us what we were doing there. Jared gave him the popcorn. Tom said he just got done decorating the room for Christmas and asked if we wanted to see it. I had pretty much given up on being on time so I laughed and said sure. Then it clicked. I figured it out. There was totally a surprise party in there. Plus the lights were off. How obvious. I walked in, saw my dad turn the lights on, and people yelled "surprise!" from the loft. They came down and I awkwardly hugged them one-by-one. At least now I understood why Jared was acting like such a weirdo. 

I liked it because I didn't have to decide who to invite. A lot of my friends had to work, or were at sports things, but most of them were still there. It was a pretty fun day, despite my frustration at my poor boyfriend's slowness as he tried to procrastinate so they could finish getting ready. It definitely cheered me up, and tore me away from the dreaded birthday decay!