Tag Archives: Birthdays

‘You’re doing it wrong’ – A birthday letter from myself

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MISCDear Mary,

Tomorrow is your birthday so if there was ever an appropriate time for your inner monologue to give some more 3D advice, I guess this is it (-That’s me, by the way. I’m your inner monologue. You may not know me very well because your outer monologue is a bit of a conversation hog).

Anyway, it’s nice to touch base once in a while. The fact that you’re listening to Taylor Swift and writing letters to yourself makes me think you probably haven’t changed much since we last talked. The fact that you’re binge-eating your birthday candy right now reinforces that suspicion.

Listen, I don’t know how long you’re going to stay focused before some 3-minute video clip on facebook breaks your concentration, so I’ll get right to this.

It’s time to grow up a little.

Woah there! Don’t get so worked up! That was not an insult or a threat or whatever. But there is a time to be a child and a time to be a “young person” and there’s time to start assuming some basic adult responsibilities and habits (‘now’ being the latter of those times). This isn’t going to be scary. It’s not going to be “lame.” And hopefully it won’t throw you into a 2-month depression where you only listen to Kenny Loggins’ “Pooh Corner” on repeat like you did when you turned 17. (That would have been a good time for me to write you a letter).

All I want to do is offer you some “life suggestions.” Continue reading →

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Even numbers

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IMG_3214I have this theory about birthdays: uneven numbers are the worst.

That’s the whole thing in a nutshell. Every year in which I’ve been an uneven age has been just awful, starting at 17 and crowning magnificently at 21. I have spent the last nine months saying, “Less than a year till you’re 22 and it’ll all be okay again.”

You wouldn’t believe me if I told you how hard this year has been. Not the stuff I complain about here on my blog like missing buses, falling down stairs in public, or getting conned out of five euros by a Romani ten minutes after landing in a foreign country. Not even playing ‘King of the Hill’ with that stupid spider in my bathroom and losing every time, thusly having to wash my hair in the sink downstairs (like, how long do I have to wait for this ridiculous arachnid to just die already?). That stuff all makes for great story fodder and to be honest, I don’t mind the misadventures.

I’m talking about the stuff that people don’t post about on facebook because it falls into the “major overshare” category. The stuff I have to wake my dad up for at 11 p.m. because this kind of catastrophe cannot be left till morning. The stuff that makes you cry all the way to work in the morning and all the way home, and then leaves you sitting on your bed staring out your window all night long during memorial day weekend because sleeping just doesn’t make sense anymore (and because it’s memorial day weekend so you don’t have to get up the next morning).

This is not a pity party – this is me saying, yup, I have those years too.

Continue reading →