Being Boring

My birthday was this past Thursday.  I don't know if this is a problem for other people, but I always feel a lot of pressure to have fun on my birthday, which makes it really hard to actually have any fun.  It was the worst on my twenty-first birthday, when you're pretty much expected to party yourself into oblivion, and I had just gotten back from England a month before so I was still dealing with reverse culture shock and catching up with what all I'd missed while I was gone.  I honestly think I went to bed before midnight.

This year really wasn't much different.  I'm not sure what the proper morning period is for a life plan, but I'm not quite over it just yet.  Plus, everyone I know is somewhere else.  Last Thursday came and went with little to no ceremony.  Of course, I did manage to have some fun this weekend, and I know next weekend my brother and I are having something of a late joint birthday party (his birthday is today), but not doing anything on the actual day was kind of nice.

It's hard for me to enjoy myself when I know that I'm supposed to be enjoying myself, and it's even harder to admit I'm not enjoying myself to the other self-enjoyers around me when this happens.  This is why I don't like watching a lot of movies, especially comedies, and especially with other people.  There's nothing worse than watching a movie everyone around you loves that you can't seem to find anything funny about at all.  You don't want to ruin anyone else's happiness, so you just do your best to smile along and not give voice to your real feelings.

Sometimes this is what I find myself doing on my birthday, trying to assure whoever I'm with that they've provided me a sufficiently good time.  But not this year.  This year I "borrowed" some good music from the local library, had a big bowl of ice cream cake, and vegged on my parents new couch (my parents made a really good decision with this new couch; it's fake leather, and whatever they stuffed the cushions with is so springy that if you plop down on them hard enough you could potentially bounce right back off).  Maybe it sounds boring, but I was relaxed, and thus fairly happy.

Tomorrow is Valentine's Day, another chance to feel pressured.  Just yesterday my mother felt the need to comment on my current (i.e. perpetual) lack of boyfriend.  For once I can point out that my life should probably be on some sort of track before I try to bring other people into it, but there is something of a stigma for those not attached on February fourteenth.  For women (am I old enough yet to be referring to myself as a woman?  I'm not sure) it seems you should either be in a relationship, desperately attempting to be in a relationship, or a single-and-proud-of-it-Valentine's-Day-hater.  If your are none of those things there's nothing for you, at least not in my experience.

So tomorrow will be the same for me as any other day, hyping myself up on copious amounts of tea while searching for a decent job and writing poems that will hopefully at some point see the light of day.  Again, maybe that's really boring, but it feels better than what I was trying to do before, so I'm content.