another candle in the cake....

it was my bday... again!... the 53rd or 54th... i look younger than you'd think...;)
it hit me a little hard on the outset... OMG what am i doing with my life!... i'll never find a job i like/love... never settle down... never find my john galt... so many 'never's.... so i drugged myself to sleep, unwilling to be awake at the hour i was born...

after many nightmares on similar topics, i woke up to some unusually chirpy birds... the cat was in their nesting territory and all they could do was try and chirp it away!!!

now, b'days can be celebrated/not celebrated in a million different ways... my folks believe in subdued celebration... all day they never wished me... or made direct references to the b-day... you'd have thought i was volunteering for a cancer-cure instead of it just being my bday... they would've considered it awfully rude and forward to go around wishing their offspring b'days!... but they did quietly bring out and light the special silver diyas... and might also have tried bargaining some sense into me with their gods... very quietly... pretending all the while that nothing was amiss...

in the evening, i went on the inevitable annual trip to the temple... like a visit to the dentist or TT shots... it's a pretty little lakshmi temple... there were the usual teeming devotees, the usual prasad(reason to go)... i kept looking back anxiously towards the door the whole while... i have a phobia of losing my footwear in public places... that's the one reason i avoid temples... the other is that i don't believe in gods... but it went off without a hitch... well, mostly...

for me, mostly, the difference was all the friends i talked to after so long... though i thought i'd taken out my bdate off the facebook/orkut pages, some still remembered... the others will get called and abused today for forgetting my big day... there were wishes ranging from the terse 'btw happy b'day' from Jerks to poetry in kannada from a mysterious sender...

there was a lot of 'walking and talking'... catching up... promising to keep in touch... (though this time, i actually meant it! :) no, seriously! )... i think that's gonna be my resolution for this year... a little less anti-socialism...

evening come, cakes came out... 20 little similar colored candles and the rest 7 in an assortment of every other sort... somebody hadnt thought the whole thing through!  i chose the biggest helping of cake... got tired midway... my selectively-helpful brother happily finished it for me... and i guess i fell asleep trying to watch a marathon of 'Pirates of the Carribean'...

a decent b'day in all...
the only thing missing was balloons... helium balloons... maybe in 6 months...