This is your birthday song, it isn't very long...

This is the Birthday Crown of Shame.  It's a weird tradition.

I’m 24 years old today.  I think I gave the impression last year that I have the worst birthdays.  This is not true.  I simply have the worst birthday PARTIES.  Wonderful things have happened on my birthdays:  I’ve gotten scholarships, first kisses, Mexican food, boxes full of glitter, the chance to be “President for a day”, fizzy pink martinis, and my very first copy of Seventeen magazine* all on my birthday.

Looking back on my birthdays, I think it’s important to note that my life philosophy is in there somewhere:  It’s the little things that make life worth it.  Life in general isn’t so much about the super great things that happen so much as the fact that someone made you a cake with the super creative decoration of your name being scrawled across the top and however many candles happened to be in the cabinet above the stove at the time.  It’s about people knowing it’s your birthday and going out of their way to tell you that they remembered.  (Or that they saw it on Facebook.)

Life should be about walks in light spring rain and on frigid, sunny days.  Life should be about practicing what you preach, and trying to defend your beliefs, not with attack, but with reason.  Life should be a chance to practice love.  All kinds of love, not just the romantic kind: even the “I love the whole world” and the “I like to smile at happy dogs” kind of love.

So with all the wine that is left in my fridge and on my counters:** I have been alive for 24 years.  That’s 8,760 days, or 210, 240 hours, or 12,614,400 minutes.  It doesn’t seem very long at all, and I guess that’s the point.  It’s not long at all.  But it’s been enough time to learn to love more than anything the small things that happen in life.  So here’s to another year of loving the little things.  I hope that more than enough come your way.

I hope you didn't think my goofy
nature was a recent development.

______________________________________________

*This last one may be balanced out by the fact that I was sick with the flu in bed that birthday, trading off bouts of boredom with bouts of vomiting and my mom felt guilty enough to go out and buy me a magazine.  Especially since I was supposed to be “Townsperson #2” in the Youth Group production of Joan of Arc that night.

**I really need to get around to drinking some of this wine….