My Birthday

I have a Christmas birthday. You may think this sucks and you will want to pity me.

Good, you should because it does suck and I will gladly take your pity.

I mean, come on, how am I supposed to compete with Jesus. Sure, I think that I can be a pretty great guy most times but the last miracle that I performed was getting Little Hoss to cram one more green bean down her piehole. And it’s not like I just snapped my fingers to do that either, I had to work at my miracle. It was done with full on chants of “just one more, just one more, just one more” as I twirled the green bean in front of her mouth like a magic wand. I find it amazing that when it comes to dog food, that little trap of hers can open up and chomp down like a croc. But when it comes to dinner time it’s like she is reminding me that I have forgotten to get her a tetanus shot and this lock jaw is the result. Good times.

It’s hard to say if my birthday has always been overshadowed and I don’t want you to take this blog as me whining, even though I fully acknowledge that I am. I’m just trying to tell you where I’m coming from. As a kid my mom went to great lengths to celebrate my birthday. For my parties, we usually had them on Dec 1 so that the kids would come to my party. Otherwise no one would come during the Christmas breaks. I would just be that sad little kid with the cake and a hat and the mandatory present from my parents. Umm, pity, umm, soak it in buddy.

Around the age of 13 is when I realized that my birthday could no longer compete. I was no longer kid cute and slumber parties for teenage boys are usually a bad idea. Shit gets broken and someone somewhere is going to find some inappropriate porn. It got to the point that I made my own balloons for myself and woke up and sang my own song.

My mother has always tried though but even after a while you have to ask, What’s the point? Just give me my birthday presents with my Christmas presents and we’ll call it a day. Not only do I have a Christmas birthday but I have the unfortunate placing of having my birthday between Christmas and New Years. So as an adult I can’t even go out and get plastered because everyone knows that the good parties are just a couple of days away.

You would think that these moments would be enough to shape me and they were but they weren’t the worst. The worst is thanks to Evil Queen Kate, good bless her evil ways.

In college I still held onto the hope that my birthday was important and special and that at least someone outside of my mother would remember and make it special. I should also point out that my first couple of years of college I was a very pathetic duddard. I have no problem admitting that. I wasn’t a nerd, I wasn’t cool, women didn’t want me, men didn’t want me, the next door neighbors dog wouldn’t even want me. But on my birthday I held out the hope that maybe this year it would be great.
The evil queen promised it would be great and followed up by some sex. I love sex. It’s great. In fact, it’s fantastic and I couldn’t think of anything I would want more especially since the queen had been holding out on me. I didn’t know why but it would appear at the time that she was busy getting penicillin shots due to her midnight rendezvous with homeless people.

So over Christmas break I make sure that I have no plans on my birthday, which wasn’t hard for the stated reasons above. The queen said she would call, we’d go out and then rent a hotel room for freaky action. I’m in.

I get up and decide to start a tradition. On my birthday, I buy myself a present. This is not as pathetic as it sounds. Ok, it is but I still don’t care because I shop great for myself. I see a movie by myself to kill time and come home and wait for the call.

I wait, wait, wait, play some monopoly by myself, check the dog for fleas, eat some dinner and wait. I wait for something that never comes. She never calls. There were no messages. There were no “I’m sorry I missed you” on the answering machine. There wasn’t even a freaking card that came in the mail from her to say “sorry you are such a chump, have a coke.” Nothing.

I wasn’t furious because pathetic guys don’t get furious. We just wallow deeper in our crapulence. Hello my good friend, do you mind if I spend the night with you one more time as the evil queen does this yet again to us? This is what I had been reduced to. I even called her, very bad idea. 20 phone calls and no answers. Pathetic and creepy, is there any better combination??

The night ended with me getting extremely drunk which would basically continue for several months in which I failed a class called The Care and Management of Companion Animals. The final was an open book test and I still failed the class. It would appear not going to class was a very bad idea.

Christmas break is about over and I finally get a call from the evil queen. She wants me to ride back to college with her because she is afraid to go on road trips by herself.

I inquire as to why I have not heard from her and perhaps she would like to explain why on my birthday I was drinking gallons of scotch.

“Oh yea, I forgot about that. I went to a club with someone.”

Really I say. With who?

“A guy she met a couple of days ago.” “He’s in a show and asked me to come so I went.”

What kind of show?

“Well” she says “It was a show of drag queens and he’s in it.”

That thud that you may hear is the last shred of my dignity and confidence falling through the floor and being sucked in by the evil queen overlord of the 9th circle.

So just so I get this straight, I got stood up for a drag queen that she just met before coming home. Jesus, at least lie to me. Tell me something that wouldn’t make me not only question our relationship (ha!) but also my manhood. In one shrewd move she was able to castrate me and make me look like even more of a pathetic ass. Honestly, you gotta respect that kind of ingenuity. And to make it even better, being the doormat that I was, I still took her back to college. I pretty much decided that then and there that I would no longer count on anyone to celebrate my birthday with anyone else, ever. Fuck em.

And I did this for quite a while. But what I see now was that this was necessary for me to go through because it made me the spineless blob that Hossmom would one day find passed out in tighty whities on my dorm room bed. For some reason she thought that I had hit rock bottom enough that I could be rebuilt in her image, which she did. And it gets better because Hossmom has never forgotten my birthday, not once, and has always made a big deal out of it. It kinda makes you appreciate her even more.

On my birthdays now though I always count on one person to be there more than anyone else. Little Hoss hasn’t let me down yet and I doubt she ever will.