WORST BIRTHDAY EVER!

Well, not really. I actually had a pretty decent birthday, if one didn’t mind the achingly oppressive heat and humidity that makes up this part of the year. It’s my first birthday without my grandfather around and I guess that was kind of what made it sad. I remember when I was a young’un and waking up and having him hand me five or ten dollars for the occasion, or spanking me for how many years I had grown. It really began to smart once I hit age twelve or thirteen, when I got too heavy to be spanked. Wait, am I supposed to be writing this down?

Anyway, I waited a whole week to get paid for a dinky Fourth of July work/operation thing I did with my absolutely emotionally unstable friend Roy. I was camped out for six days on the side of the road in the next county, with the express promise that I would have 500 smackers in my hand by the end of the week. Instead all I got was acid bug bites, a tarantula bite on my leg, several stubbed, blackened toes, indigestion, nausea, a heightened case of claustrophobia, and a sore ear, mainly from listening to Roy’s personal dilemmas, namely those dealing with his boyfriend, who was stable and dependable, but completely vulnerable to Roy’s emotionally charged outbursts of psychoboyfriendism. His name is Zeke, and he works as an event planner in the next town over. This all boiled over about the night before the Fourth in which Nature Herself decided to celebrate appropriately by sending us a brilliant display of violent lightning, the which almost hit where we were camped out; after it rained the bugs came in and began to pester us. I now know what St. Antony must have felt like being besieged by Satan, as de Voragine tells us. Roy had a huge fight with Zeke, leaving me to fend for myself, Zeke’s car ended up getting a broken window on account of Roy, and the rest of the night I stayed up on my bare feet counting boxes and trying not to get bitten again.

In the end out of the promised 1500 dollars, I ended up getting a measly 181.24, part of which went into bills and the like, and part into lunch with my very understanding aunt, who consoled me as I got the check. All that hard work for nothing! All that missed gym time! All that dirty underwear and unwashed armpits! All the missed episodes of Dr. Phil! I felt robbed.

So obviously a couple of weeks have passed since then, I’ve been making ends meet somehow, but boy, do I have some debts! I was thinking about school, but I missed deadlines. I was planning to make a break towards California, but the money was held up in the paycheck, and I couldn’t exactly sue Roy, since he himself had sold short much of the merchandise, which he gouged prices towards. My thoughts are that either he sold short into deficit of the actual retail price, or we didn’t obviously sell enough. We had several days full of rain, the very start of the summer rainy season down here, and I believe ’twill last ’till September, and the time of the Equinox.

Talking to my pastor friend Kevin, who wishes to give me business opportunities, I feel now that God is telling me to save myself. I don’t know how I will proceed doing so, but I think I’m on the right track now. All I have to do is make it known to the individuals who placed me here in this position in the first place is what I feel I am prepared to do. I wouldn’t mind handouts, too. I feel that because of my absolutely dismal social/family life, I have to escape back to school, when all I’ve got is what I know now. Kevin says I’ve worked on two things in my life: my intellect and my structure, so now I have to work on my common sense. I feel no one can help me sometimes; I wish more would obviously understand.

My birthday came on the 24th, and two friends, my friend Peter and my friend Rick, remembered. No one called. My mother and my brother, as well as my other siblings and father, remembered also, but aside from that no one called to wish me a happy birthday, nor was there a cake (save for a last minute reprieve), nor were there any presents. I spent that night in tears, thinking everyone had forgotten about it. I feel and wonder as if I have transgressed against God and am now paying for it. The most simple and beautiful things for me are the most meaningful, and my little cake and bag of gummi fruit slices seemed to correspond to that. I’ve been depressed since then; I think I’ll be OK, but I’m not sure where my future is headed to.