As my dreaded 30th birthday is coming I am reminded of all my past birthdays. It is really cool having a birthday at the end of May and on Memorial Day. Summer is beginning, school is just getting out, kids want to party, and along comes my birthday, a perfect excuse to party. I have never not had a party, except for my infamous 21st birthday. The party memories begin when I was 7 and living in Alaska. I got my first tent and we all had a campout party. All my friends came over and there was cake and ice cream and presents(standard fare). As I got older my parties evolved into pizza and cake and ice cream and B-rated movies. The B-Rated movies were movies like "The Stuff" and "Microwave Massacre". They were funny to watch but interesting enough to wonder how it got produced. I would always have 4-8 people at my parties. Some kids would come and wouldn't be sociable. Others would leave around midnight. I remember we put shaving cream on kitty and would chase her around the neighborhood. We had water balloon fights. Swimming also was beginning around that time, so we would swim before we had pizza. One time there was this guy who was a friend of my brother's who no one else knew who stayed at the party till the next afternoon. Everyone was like,"Who is that guy?" Another time there was a friend who somehow got the dates mixed up and thought my party was the next day. Last year I had that couple that slept in my bed and the guy who was in my bathroom for over an hour. My 21st birthday I was working for a moving company during the summer. I woke up at 5:30am and didn't get home until 1am. I worked the whole day. I think the moving company got an earful from my mom as everyone was wondering where I was. As I reach 30 I am still thinking I have to have a party. Most people don't for some reason. I can see why, it gets depressing being older. I think there is some magical age where you go from celebrating your birthday to dreading it. That age seems to be 30.

Thought of the Day
"Well, birthdays are merely symbolic of how another year's gone by and how little we've grown. No matter how desperate we are that someday a better self will emerge, each flicker of the candles on the cake we know it's not to be. That for the rest of our sad, wretched, pathetic lives, this is who we are to the bitter end. Inevitably, irrevocably. Happy birthday? No such thing."
- Jerry, trying not to be funny, in "The Visa"