Birthday Luck

I hate my birthday. Now, I am not a negative person by a long shot. I just really truly like every other day of the year more than my birthday. There is the obvious reason that I am becoming one year older and thus one year closer to having to lie about my age (and in the opposite direction than when I used to lie about my age in high school and college) but also due to the phenomenal amount of bad luck that seems to befall me on this day. So perhaps this blog would be more aptly titled had I amended 'Lack of' to the beginning of it. Every year, as I approach May 18th, I set my expectations unbelievably low, and without fail, the day always seems to miss the bar.

When I say that I set the bar low, I'm not even talking about in terms of the good things I expect to come out of it, like getting disappointed because I didn't get flowers delivered to me at work (Though incidentally, one year I had told a former boyfriend about my lack of luck on my birthday, and he naively attempted to fight my bad birthday curse by sending roses to my work. However the delivery man lost the card containing the delivery address, but remembered the name of my company, and ended up looking up the address of some other part of our company that was across town. Needless to say, I never got my flowers.) No, my setting of the bar involves just hoping that the world doesn't decide to take a giant shit on me, which it inevitably does.

This year was no different. I rang in the big 2-7 sleeping on my floor on a makeshift mattress composed of my sweatshirt and some dish towels. My bed is now in Australia but hanging out in customs for 10-15 business days. As you can imagine, this was not an ideal sleeping arrangement, but I figured I could deal for one night as a coworker of mine was bringing me his inflatable bed that day to borrow. I was awoken at about two in the morning by a huge thunder storm outside. Up to this point, as I had mentioned before, the weather has been beautiful. Naturally the sky would decide to fall in this country, that it is worth noting is IN A DROUGHT, on the day of my birth. I spent the next 5 hours of my life tossing and turning on the hard-as-rocks floor and listening to the cyclone coming down outside.

When it was finally time to go to work, I got up, running on three hours sleep, and was reminded of my lack of umbrella. This could happen on any day since my umbrella turnover rate is pretty high, but of course, it happened on my birthday. I used my Banana Republic coat to try to shield my purse and laptop as I embarked on the 45 minute walk to work. One tiny ray of sunshine in my day came when at one part of my walk, a woman noticed my struggle and ran over to me to share her umbrella with me. She was only going in the same direction as me for about ten more yards, natch, but I will say that her random act of kindness was well received and made me feel a little better about the day and about mankind.

The day at work was relatively uneventful. My team was actually awesome about my birthday. Everyone had remembered and they even got me cake which I promptly proceeded to drop face down on the floor. The lack of sleep makes most of the day pretty hazy, but I do know that I went to the convenience store and bought not one but TWO umbrellas to ensure I would not be caught in a similar situation to this mornings any time soon (or at the very least, for the next two days, given the average life cycle of an umbrella of mine).

At the end of the day, I threw my coworkers heavy aero bed on my back and proceeded home. I had planned to catch a cab but due to the heavy rain, it was near impossible, so I walked about a mile to the train station. The station nearest my house is at Kings Cross. As I mentioned before, this is the red light district, full of brothels, strip clubs and degenerates. It is also a LOT of fun on weekends, when I aspire to be one of those degenerates. Not being too well acquainted with my new neighborhood just yet, I managed to meander all the way into the heart of the Cross, aero bed in tow, before realizing my mistake. Though the area is quite seedy and I was a bit concerned about my safety, it didn't stop me from making a joke to myself about how with this aero bed, in this area, I essentially could carve out a career as a mobile brothel.

Finally at home, I set up my aero bed, and looked forward to a night of floor-less sleep that I was about to embark on. I also looked forward to my birthday being over. At 2AM, I woke up...on the floor. Under me was the flattened aero bed, which evidently had a hole in it. My birthday luck was seemingly running on Pacific time. I spent the next few hours wrestling with the corpse of the aero bed until it was time to get up. Maybe I just looked out the window at the wrong time or maybe I was hallucinating due to lack of sleep, but when I checked the weather outside, it looked lovely and so I decided against bringing one of my new umbrellas with me, lest it become another statistic in my lost umbrella logs. I don't even think I have to tell you what happened here, suffice to say that I made my proud purchase of umbrella #3 on my way to work this morning.

When all is said and done, I guess this isn't all that bad. I still have all my limbs, I wasn't set on fire and I was never in any danger of being on the news for any reason (except possibly the entrepreneurship of my new mobile brothel). Plus most of the stuff that happened to me could happen on any given day, and it would just be another bad day, but it just seems to especially suck when that day is your birthday, a day that we are conditioned to believe is supposed to be filled with happiness and joy. However, I breathe a sigh of relief knowing there are 364 days before me and my birthday meet again.