It's my birthday today, and it's actually a day that I don't really celebrate. The last time I maybe tried to do something special for my birthday was back in 2008, when Silvia and I met up with Catherine in London, but that was on the back of a year where I'd been sober for the whole time, on account of being so hungover on my birthday in 2007 that I decided not to drink for a full year. So what did I do in 2008? I drank myself stupid, was hungover the next day, decided I wouldn't drink for another three years - but a few days later I was downing beers like a champ.
A thing I remember really well from my 2007 birthday was that I decided to go the movies while dead hungover, and I saw a movie that to this day I still have not figured out whether it was one of the best or one of the worst movies I've ever seen - a flick called 'Body Rice', that tells the story of some German delinquents kids that were sent to Portugal as part of some sort of social rehabilitation program. It was weird, and disturbing, and I haven't dared to watch it again since.
A story I guess I never told - at least here - was of my 2009 birthday. That might have been the one where I started to stop caring about the whole thing anyway. I'd made friends with a girl I met at work - she was a customer at the mobile phone store I worked at - and we graduated from online friends mostly to going out together here and there. But we were just friends - though we were both in long distance relationships, there was never anything - or even remotely close - between us. So around my birthday she asks me if I want to go out for a walk with her, and then we could have dinner together. There was a Chinese place in Angel that she really wanted to take me to. I said sure, and on my birthday I met up with her on the south bank - only to find out that she wasn't alone. She had, in fact, a gaggle of friends with her, none of which I knew. And it's not like I was expecting something else than what we had planned to happen, but goddamn - I wasn't expecting strangers. That day seemed to go on and on endlessly, and I was too dumb or too chicken to come up with some excuse and make like the flash. No, I stayed there, I felt awful and excluded the whole time, and then I said something so monumentally stupid that everyone there thought me an ignoramus. I guess the conversation revolved around dreams, and I blurted out the name of a Queensryche song - 'I dream in infrared'. So they asked me how I knew I dreamt in infrared, what with them being actual scientists and being naturally curious as to why I would make such a claim. Whatever it was I replied, I made sure that I never spoke again that night.
Birthdays? Bah humbug, who needs birthdays?
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