Happy Birthday To Me
As of an hour ago, I am no longer a teenager.
As a testament to my teenagehood, I spent the last four hours of it watching TV. What a bummer.
This birthday is better than the rest though. You see, I have the misfortune of sharing a birthday with my father (no, seriously). Yeap, my life went downhill even from birth. As I always kid - I ruined one of my father’s birthdays and he has ruined all of my birthdays since. My father is a workaholic and I don’t remember a time where he would be early on his - and my - birthday.
Therefore, most of my birthdays were cake cutting ceremonies after 10pm. After moving to the Klang Valley, my aunt committed to take my father (and therefore me) with the rest of the family out for dinner, usually in April or if the stars are aligned for me, late March.
But back in Ipoh, all I wanted was what my other brothers got - Pizza Hut maybe, McDonalds? (I was a jinjang kid from a jinjang town). I had only one birthday party that wouldn’t revolve around my father’s work whenI was around 8 y.o. - it was a monumental flop. It was raining cats and dogs and only two friends showed up.
Until recently, I considered a shared birthday as some sort of novelty - that is besides the days leading up to March 2nd. But nowadays, bleh, it’s not like you can have a circus display. I rather have 11 fingers instead.
Well, this year is slightly different. It would be the first time my friends are throwing a celebration for me.I don’t know what yet - all I know is that I have to be there in some medium-high-end (i.e. expensive) shopping mall by 2pm. The odd thing is that these friends were the friends I heavily considered leaving after STPM towards more “Christian” friends.
Oh well - for the past two years they have been with me through thick and thin (in all non-religious and non-sexual matters), and it was a pretty tough period; they don’t call STPM the world’s second hardest test for no good reason. More than that actually, it’s not as if they’re making a small sacrifice. One of those friends have a boyfriend that passed out after a brain haemmorrage and drove into a ravine miles away from civilization (they call the place Negeri Sembilan). Another have classes and another has a job (thus the perculiar timing).
I guess I wouldn’t be at all touched by all this if not for the fact that I had never had a decent birthday party (except the first few ones where I have no memory of) while most of my brothers typically did when they were younger. Except of course, my oldest brother, whose birthday falls, always, during exam season (and when he started working, oddly, always out of town) so it would be he that turn down celebratory offers.