2 posts tagged “life”
How do you feel about your birthday? Do you look forward to it and remind all your friends, or do you dread it and try to keep it a secret?
Why do so many of these questions seem to be written with complete ignorance of a "middle ground"? Huh? Why is that?
Honestly, I'm pretty neutral. Yeah, I enjoy the excuse to have friends over, and I'm always happy when they decide to get me something special (though I hardly expect anything). And I enjoy that it's one of those times when it's socially acceptable in Amerikan society for men to bake (and I do love baking).
What I dread is the fact that my birthday is in late July and I live in Ann Arbor, Michigan. That means The Ann Arbor Fart Air Art Fair, and the associated traffic jams that prevent a lot of people from getting to my apartment. This means attendance is usually sparse, at best, with the only people consistently showing up being my friends Raine and Cynthia (whose apartment is almost right next to mine) and a couple of people I know in Ypsilanti, and maybe some people from the Detroit area, but the cost of petrol usually keeps them at home. This sparse attendance has gotten me frequently questioning my own value as a human being, and that's never a good thing.
Another thing that I dread is the fact that even my friends regularly dispute my age. Apparently I dress and sometimes act older that a guy my age, but at the same time, from the shoulders up, I look (and occasionally act) much younger than a guy my age. I'm sure you may be thinking, "you lucky little shit", but let me assure you, this ambiguous age game is only fun for the people playing it, and not for those who are the subject of the game.
Other than that, my birthday has more spiritual significance than any other kind of significance, and I don't dread that at all. In fact, i look forward to that a little more than I look forward to cake and friends.
When did you really get to make a difference for someone else?
Submitted by bodhibound.
A good difference or a bad difference?
"Make a difference" -- pretty vague, that.
In 2003, I left my boyfriend of three years in probably the most immature way possible: I went to Los Angeles and was there for maybe two weeks before I had the guts to tell him that I had no intentions of coming back. In retrospect, that was a really bad idea for a number of reasons; first and foremost being that two romances before me, he was dumped pretty much by proxy of figuring out that they had already started dating somebody else.
While my ex- in question and I eventually "made up" and became friends after that, he's still a lot less trusting of other people than he used to be, which is actually saying a lot, because the ex- of his that I mentioned probably left him slightly less trusting but that optimistic spark in him hadn't died out yet.
While he's still my best friend, if only because I can't think of anybody else who would put up with me or anybody else after what I did to him, he's a totally different person now than when I dated him. Well, of course, a lot of people are a "totally different person" now versus who they were in 2003 (and if you can say otherwise, then you probably have a LOT of growing up to do), but a lot of what's changed about his personality wasn't for the better. He's far more pessimistic and misanthropic than he used to be, he's gone from a.. let's say "hopeful agnostic Pagan" to a being a rather "hopeless hardcore Atheist". He expects the worst out of most people when, before, he pretty much gave everybody a "clean slate" until they started writing on it themselves.
I've definitely "made a difference", but at the same time, I doubt anybody would say that it was for the best.
