Arbitrary Rulings 16 (Birthday Edition)

Cake - It's fine, I guess, if not a little... you know... predictable. Maybe I'm just a free-spirit hippie with big ideas that are scary to small town folk, or maybe I just like thinking outside the celebratory foods box, but it seems to me that there are SO MANY other things out there into which you can jam a bunch of candles. Birthday pizza? Birthday tandoori chicken? Birthday duo of short ribs and foie gras (if you're a fancy pants). The possibilities are only limited by your imagination and/or life-threatening allergies, so go fucking nuts. It's your special day, after all; what the fuck kind of you-hating bastard is going to get all up in your grill for wanting to make your birthday wish over a six-foot party sub or a bubbling pot of gumbo or a burrito as big around as a Duraflame log? However, all that being said... if it HAS to be cake... I'd like Red Velvet please. Chocolate cake is done to death and white cake is for weddings. Yellow cake is okay but I hate eating stuff that's pee-colored, strawberry cake is for 10-year-old princess parties, carrot cake is for old people, and everything else is for freaks and weirdos who really should just give up on cake altogether and start eating pie.

Presents - Who doesn't love presents? It's free stuff, given with love, and did I mention that it's free? Like, you don't even have to chip in. How awesome is that? SO awesome. Particularly since you're getting all this free stuff basically because you managed to not die for 365 days straight. None too shabby, although the whole concept CAN blow up in your face like a shaken soda. I mean, not all the presents you get are going to be the complete DVD box set of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, say, or a membership to the Jerky of the Month club. Sometimes, well-meaning but wrong-headed folks will saddle you with an orange-and-green itchy barbed wire sweater vest or a new puppy made of diarrhea or your father's severed head in a box. And then it's like AWKWARD. Because you have to smile all, "No, I've TOTALLY always wanted my father's severed head in a box... that's just... wow... THANK you." But folks always know you're lying, especially when you're sobbing your eyes out like that. What, you've never seen a severed head in a box before? You weenie.

Calender Placement - As in, on which day your birthday falls relative to the calender year. Mine, for example, is today... August 6th... as good a day as you're going to find to have people fawn over you like you're some sort of big shot or something. It's far from any of the major gift-giving holidays, it's during the summer when everyone is at least somewhat in a party-down frame of mind anyway, and it's a birth date shared by Robert Mitchum and Lucille Ball so FUCK YOU, MOTHERFUCKER!!! Er... sorry... that was totally uncalled for. I'm just trying to say that I'm generally quite pleased with my birthday's calender placement; sometimes said feelings of contentment come out in unnecessarily aggressive swearing. But yeah... August 6th... beats the holy hell out of having your birthday during December. Or, God forbid, actually ON Christmas. If that's the case, you might as well give up on the idea of happiness and devote yourself to studying the philosophy of Pessimism as laid out by the gruff, scowly philosopher Schopenhauer. Or you could get really into Leonard Cohen music and walk around all hang-dog and weeping. Or you could wear a lot of black and crash funerals during your free time. Well, whatever you choose to do, it should be geared towards getting you used to a lifetime of misery because you're NEVER going to get both a birthday present AND a Christmas present. They'll always be combined because people are cheap. Even your parents will give up after a while because, seriously, who needs the hassle? So sad... so... sad... Anyway... yeah, having a summer birthday is AWESOME!!!

Having to Work - This is the first time EVER that I've actually worked on my birthday. Usually I take the day off and lay around in my underwear while eating a whole fried chicken and drinking straight from the bottle of whatever rotgut is on sale because calories and liver damage don't count when it's YOUR DAY (true) (not true), but it just kind of didn't work out that way this year. See, I'm already off on Friday, and that's when we're having the big-assed party, and we're not really doing anything particular today anyway and... whatever... I just decided to say fuck it and show up. Besides, I'm planning on having a little mini-celebration right here at my cubicle. My stapler and my tape dispenser and my phone and my computer are all going to hide behind my office chair and jump out and go SURPRISE when I come back from the bathroom and then we'll laugh and laugh and I'll remember to take my anti-psychotic medications and we'll laugh some more. Good times, man... good, mentally ill times...

[Insert Age] Will Be Different - Yeah, yeah. Just like the new year was different, right? You were going to get a better job and drop twenty pounds and take a Chinese cooking class, weren't you? Make your own motherfucking Peking Duck up in this biznitch? Did...um.. any of that actually happen? It didn't, huh? Still at the same old job... still a fatty... your wok is still in it's box, overflowing with stir frys left un-stir fried. Well... Hey, maybe NEXT year will be different. Maybe. Probably not, right? But MAYBE...