Happy Birthday To Meeee....

Okay, maybe not completely happy. Not miserable--it would have to go a long way to win the Worst Birthday Ever award...but...Meh. Not so hot.

The not-so-hot-ness was largely contributed by the total absence of recognition from two people from whom I would have hoped for...a phone call. An e-mail. Something. Anything.

Both Tim (to a lesser extent, as he's sorta expected to be a nitwit) and Debbi (totally amazed by this one) are on my "People Who Have Made Me Sad" list.

From Tim, it's expected. He'll call in a couple of days and toss out some excuse, and honestly that's sorta okay, because I forgot Squeaky's birthday last week and I never, ever get the exact date right for Tim's, and so if he calls within the relevant WEEK we can count it as "a birthday call". But from Debbi...wow. That stings. Cowgirl sent me an e-card, which was cool...that's how Cowgirl and I do, e-cards and text messages and the occasional non-sequitur sent in an unmarked envelope via US Mail...but from Debbi, my oldest friend...nada.

And I don't want to feel like I'm keeping score, but this is AFTER I made a special effort to get to her birthday party, full of people I didn't know, which ramped my social anxiety up to, like, a billion...and after I went out of my way to make sure she knew that I appreciated her, because she was going through some rough times right around her birthday.

Of course, shortly afterwards, she and her current guy got serious-er, apparently, and I haven't heard from her since....

I've done it myself--gotten involved with Some Stoopid Boy and let everything else go--but not in the past ten or twelve years...not since CR, anyway. And there were some friends who were always exempt from that kind of dumbness--like Debbi, for example. Oh well.

Overall, though, I'm not as upset about it as I would have been say, three or four months back. I'm not crushed--just annoyed. We'll see what her explanation is, when she calls.

(HUGELY-belated note, added 6/29/08: When I finally found the charger for my cell phone, then finally got both the charger and the phone in the same place, and FINALLY finally remembered to actually plug the doggone thing in and listen to the 17 voice mails--there it was, on my birthday, midafternoon, like clockwork: Debbi's message, complete with off-key birthday song. I should have known better than to even think for an INSTANT that she'd forget.)

I'm in a very strange place in my mind right now, one I don't like very much; I feel like there are a huge number of enormous changes I need to make in my life, and that's always a scary thing. I'm trying to write it all out, list and summarize and break things down, but it seems like there's no page big enough to fit it all into. If I could cover a wall with paper and climb a ladder and paint myself a new life, maybe everything would fit...

I'm middle-aged, now; there's no going back. I don't feel old, except that I've always, ALWAYS felt old--even when I was six, seven years old, I'd get all teary over thoughts of when I was younger. Seriously--I was the only six-year-old on earth who'd get weepy when she heard "The Way We Were". There was always some past behind me, even when there wasn't enough behind me to MAKE a past. When I was six, I felt old. When I was eleven, I remembered nostalgically the summer I was ten. My entire first year of college was spent wishing it was still junior and senior year of high-school; when I was 21 I told myself it was time to settle down and quit wasting my life.

It's seventeen years later--long enough, if I'd had a child, for that child to make me a grandmother. But now, unlike then, there's a very real chance that I -am- wasting my life, that I -have- wasted an irrevocable chunk of it. The hard part is, the longer I worry about what I've already wasted, the more I'm wasting. I feel sometimes like every move I can make is the wrong one, that it's safer to make no moves at all....but then again, that's what I've been doing, isn't it?

I can understand the attraction of belief in an all-knowing God, I think; someone to put you on the Right Track when you don't know what to do next. Like picking up a stuck toy car as it drives into the wall and goes nowhere, someone to pick you up and turn you around and show you which direction to go in. I can understand it; I just can't believe in it. It seems like cheating...and anyway, I haven't yet found an all-knowing God I can live with.

Then again, I haven't found a self I can live with either, yet.

(See, that's why birthdays suck--not because you're getting older, necessarily, but because they make you think about big Serious Important Issues. Better for me to think about Kasey Kahne's hot streak, or something equally fun.)