This post is generously sponsored by a Friend of The Toast.
Balloons
Hold a balloon. Don’t think about how you are one year closer to death. Keep holding the balloon. Eyes on that balloon. Let go of the balloon. Watch it disappear slowly, rising like a soul into the abyss — as you never will, because you are an atheist.
Phone Calls
Call your uncle and aunt back. Tell them you are fine. Everything is fine.
Surprise Parties
Suddenly there are people in your house. You did not say they could enter.
Party Themes
Sea creatures swim past you in a capitalist haze: plates, streamers, goodie bags. Yes, your home has, for the moment, turned into an aquarium, despite your explicit request for a dinosaur theme. You say nothing to Mother and Father.
Party Hats
Feel that you are wearing a foreign object atop your head. Marvel at the things we can get used to, the things we accept because others before us have accepted them, no matter how little sense they make. It is like a tiny dunce cap. Is that the point of it, to be made a dunce?
The Birthday Song
A prayer to Americana, the words echo in our collective psyche: Happy Birthday to you. Happy Birthday to you. Let all your questions erode with the repetition, as they might in warm water.
Birthday Candles
“Blow out the candles,” they order. “Make a wish.” And yet you all know that wishes don’t come true, at least not by the ordinance of candles. There are eight of them, one for every year of your life. The baby stares at you. You were once a baby. Smile at her before she catches on to the hollowness of adulthood. “Blow out the candles for me,” you demand of the one who still believes in wishes. The charade satisfies everyone.
Birthday Cake
Cut a piece of your dolphin-shaped cake. Watch it crumble onto your plate just as the ruins of Ancient Rome crumble over in Italy. You’ve still never been to Europe. Maybe you will never go.
Birthday Cards
Open the pre-written cards. Read them.
Gifts
Tear a corner of the paper and pull until it’s ripped halfway across the box. Pause. What is another object to add to the pile? We fill our hearts with material goods, and still our hearts are empty. Like water displaced by a pebble thrown into a lake, the discontent rises with each gift placed in your hands. You leave the box unopened in the corner of your closet. You will send a thank-you note to Grandma for the Legos anyway.
Party Favors
The noise reminds you of birthdays past. Has it been so long? O the Places You’ll Go. Where were you supposed to be by now? How many candies have you tried, how many blanket forts have you architected? The party favor unclenches its fist and screams.
Confetti
After everyone has gone, the floor will be littered with debris fallen as if from a disintegrating rainbow. How long by comparison does it take for you to explode and float to the ground? Only an instant. One moment of joy begets a multitude of sorrows. And so the ritual will continue: Oh Father, my Father, like Sisyphus, with a vacuum in place of a boulder. You will watch him wrestle with impermanence, attempt to suck the humanity out of his carpet. Shoes off, Kelsie, it is said at the front door. And for what? Your life will never be clean, as long as you are human. But for now, there is the party.
Piñatas
The seal hangs before you, complete with a papier-mâché beach ball balanced on its nose. Someone will hand you a club and ask you to smash it apart. Someone who did not think this through. You cast your father a sidelong look. Would that it were a pterodactyl, a brontosaurus even. You have already lost. Accept the blindfold. Accept the bat. Accept the darkness all around you. Where are you? What are your goals? What comes next? We swing and we swing and we swing. Life is all a gamble.
I can’t understand a world where birthday cake doesn’t guarantee immediate joy
I think this may actually be the Toast Post That I’ve Related to The Least. And that includes those themed with religions I’ve never practiced, attractions I’ve never experienced, and motherhood!
Most sheet cake is soft overly-sweet trash.
It’s better when the frosting goes stale.
Stale frosting sheet cake and free bread were the best parts of working in a bakery.
I came out to have a good time and I’m honestly feeling so attacked right now.
Thank you, I’m glad you’re feeling the full effect.
Sounds like this kid is having a sixteenth-life crisis.
She’s eight. Life is hard.
Eight sounds like about the right age for one’s first existential crisis. Or was that just me?
This accurately describes my feelings towards my birthday and life in general today.
Yep, 100% why I don’t celebrate my birthday ever.
“‘Blow out the candles for me,’ you demand of the one who still believes in wishes.”
Oh, that hurts.
I feel like playing chess with Death now.
I loved this.
I probably watched way too much Ingmar Bergman in my teens – The Seventh Seal. Back in the day pictures like that were a ticket to sophistication.
my birthday is on friday and i was going to spend the open thread regaling you all with horror stories from my childhood parties, but this basically covers it.
my birthday is also on friday! Birthday twins!
oh hey! you’re the first i’ve met. [HIGH FIVE]
do you also have cringe-y birthday memories? i don’t like practical jokes, and my family really does. but otherwise i love being born on a happy and whimsical spring day.
Thankfully my family is not big on practical jokes! Except “forgetting” my birthday. Thanks, Mom, that wasn’t traumatic at all.
aw but at least that one is pretty easy to see coming, at least after the first time.
i once blew out the candles on a fully frosted cake made of styrofoam. i don’t know if you’ve ever heard the sound styrofoam makes when you cut it with a knife, but you can probably imagine. (the prank itself is pretty clever; the setting and my particular age/temperament made it very bad)
I am tensing up just imagining it.
Could be worse. My father actually forgets my birthday on a regular basis. 🙁
aw no 🙁
Hey, it is also my birthday Friday! My family is not into practical jokes, and I enjoy having it just when spring starts.
wooooo!
it’s like the flowers come out just to celebrate us. 🙂
My birthday is on Friday too! Thankfully my family doesn’t really do practical jokes!
jealousssssssssssssss
i wonder if there’s a good way to do a joint birthday-fun thread in the open thread. not sure i’m up to the pressure tho.
O the Places You’ll Go. Where were you supposed to be by now?
Thanks. Thanks for this.
You were supposed to be shopping with ninjas, and/or commenting on the Toast, perfectly done.
I like you. Let’s be friends.
Done!
MY BIRTHDAY IS TOMORROW.
This is a good article.
The two are mostly unrelated.
Suddenly there are people in your house. You did not say they could enter.
This…is basically the reason I hate surprise parties. Or any parties. Or guests, even the invited ones.
Yes. The last surprise birthday party I was given ended in tears. I hated it. I did my best to thank. I’d prefer to throw my own party when I am 65 and finally hitting Medicare. Coming soon
Some of the best parties I’ve thrown myself have involved 0 other people! Why wait till 65 when you can celebrate without any guests interfering with you having a good time? 🙂
For a while, surprise party was the go-to response to “I don’t really want to do anything special this year” in my group of friends. I had two within the span of a few years thrown by the same people. I usually figure out the surprise thing, too, so I get to anticipate the party I didn’t really want. Yay! I’ve taken to organizing at least a dinner on the day, to keep people from feeling like something else needs to be done later….
Its my cousin’s birthday today – should I send her this?
Do you like your cousin?
Sorry kid, but it only gets worse. From Billy Collins’ poem On Turning Ten:
This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself,
as I walk through the universe in my sneakers.
It is time to say good-bye to my imaginary friends,
time to turn the first big number.
It seems only yesterday I used to believe
there was nothing under my skin but light.
If you cut me I could shine.
But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life,
I skin my knees. I bleed.
Thank you so much for posting this! I heard this poem when I was about that age, related SO HARD to the last stanza, and could never remember what it was called.
Welp, this feeling held off for me until the puberty-related onset of my depression/anxiety, but hoLY CATS WHY BILLY COLLINS WHY
The perfect text to share with my almost 10-year-old. Thank you!
I definitely have thought many times about getting that tattooed on my skin because I am /deep./
The ultimate dinosaur cake: http://daisyowl.com/comic/2009-04-17
Birthday horror story time? Birthday horror story time. Think this was probably my 8th or 9th birthday, and the worst one I’ve had.
[disclaimer: i am a person with male-assigned genitals and this is slightly graphic]
PRELUDE: I was friends at the time with this boy, let’s call him Edward, and we always had a lot of laughs together. He was hilarious, and I didn’t think I was that funny so I would always semi-make up stories about things that happened to me to make myself a worthwhile friend to him. One of the stories I made up at one point is that once I was on the toilet doing a poo, I wasn’t sure I was pooing so bent down and looked between my legs, and what I saw caused me to panic and think my testicles were dropping. This is not really a thing that happened to me, but it made him laugh really hard so I thought I had fulfilled my part of the friendship thing!! I also made him promise very earnestly not to tell anyone.
FAST-FORWARD: It is my birthday and me and all my friends are around my table eating cake. Conversation is a bit awkward because I know a lot of them from different things (lol this is still a problem in my life) but at some point I go to the toilet and come back surprised to see Edward is telling his funny tales and everyone is loving it! He looks at me as I come in and there is a subtly demonic quality to his smile. My heart drops. Has he told everyone the story? The one I made him swear not to tell? I look around and everyone seems to be acting normal, so I decide I’m probably imagining things.
I sit back down and Edward starts: “commentingcommenter once told me he was on the bathroom..”
Panic fills every nerve in my body. Why would he do this to me? Have I angered him in some way? I look around, wonder if my parents would make Edward leave if I asked them to, preferably before he was able to tell the story.
The next thing I remember is lying upstairs in bed sobbing, with all of my friends OUTSIDE MY DOOR ASKING IF I’LL COME OUT AND PLAY WITH THEM ON MY OWN BIRTHDAY.
Has anything this bad ever happened to you? Shall we make a thread of such traumas below?
80% of the birthdays i spent with my parents i ended up crying in much the same fashion you describe. and the first birthday i spent AWAY from my parents, my boyfriend called me on my lunchbreak and sang happy birthday and then dumped me.
This makes me feel so much less garbage-y for the time I broke up with my BF on Valentine’s Day.
Mine wasn’t that bad, but I have my own story of crying at my own birthday party. I was 17 and it was the first birthday I had had since starting sixth form (note for people outside the England and Wales school system: the last two years of school); lots of my friends had left school to go to sixth-form colleges, so we didn’t see each other as often as when we were all at school together. The party started badly when my friends asked if, rather than hanging out at my house and watching films and eating cake, we could go out to our town’s Late Night Shopping instead (the first Friday night of December, as part of the run-up to Christmas; shops would stay open late and there would be a few attractions. It is always heaving with people and not at all my sort of thing). They then talked a lot to each other about new friends they had made at college who I did not know, and said they didn’t want to watch the film I had chosen. (For context, I had recently attended one of their birthday parties; we watched Big Brother, went upstairs for an hour so everyone could gang up on one of the guests and tell her she was spending too much time with her boyfriend, and then went and watched some more Big Brother. I did not want to do any of this, but it was not my party.) Everyone made it very plain that they didn’t want to be there. I sat in an armchair and cried while my friends all chatted to each other and did not notice my tears.
I’m sorry your friends were such assholes. I hope your new friends are far more worthy of you.
They are! (although, to be honest, I mostly avoid the potential disappointment by having no social life whatsoever.)
I find that a very successful strategy myself!
I broke a dish by accident getting ready for my 11th or 12th birthday party, and spent about 25 minutes sobbing hysterically while my mom tried to calm me down before the guests started arriving. And when I was 8 or 9 I dropped a bowling ball on my foot and presumably spent the rest of the party crying in pain.
Oh, and I was sitting vigil in my (would-have-been)-FIL’s hospital room when he died the day before I turned 22. So that was not a very celebratory birthday.
OW OW OW!! YOU WIN, everyone go home. Birthdays are terrible.
My boyfriend was attending his grandmother’s funeral on my 25th birthday.
I sobbed on several of my preteen birthdays, but usually because I was convinced it was going to be a failure and nobody loved me and I wasn’t going to get good presents and my real friends wouldn’t come and I’d forget how to ice skate / bowl / jump on a trampoline / whatever the designated party activity was.
Glass half-full, that’s me!
It sucks that Edward turned your birthday into the nightmare I was always convinced (with no justification) mine would be. I hope the rest of them were substantially better.
If you’re going to be born a Pisces, you have to accept the nautical-themed parties. It’s a tradeoff, but you’ll learn to ride the wave.
It’s better than being a Gemini where your parents hire someone to pretend to be your twin, and they also get half the presents.
what
what
what
Both are better than being a Cancer. This one gets grim really quick.
Exactly what I tell my son (the Libra) when he complains that it isn’t fair that his brother (the Capricorn) got a petting zoo at his party.
At least we’ve got an excuse to be crabby about it.
Yeah, but I’ve been pushing it towards slow-growing skin cancers, and with those the endless crab buffet is enough to make up for it.
Virgo parties basically look like this: http://www.klimt.com/en/gallery/women/klimt-die-j… so I can’t complain. 😀 Granted, ‘virgo’ and ‘virgin’ are the same word in many languages, so it’s always fun telling non-English speakers my sign….
As a Scorpio, I feel super ripped off that I never had any scorpion-themed parties.
a true scorpio wants NO birthday party.
A true Scorpio wants nothing less than the answers to the secrets of your very soul.
I’m a Sagittarius – imagine my centaur-less 46 years & shed a tear for me.
I’m an Aries, so does this mean everyone at my party should be wearing horns and battering things over with their heads?
That ought to be the case for all of us, but for you, especially.
I’m feeling a little bull-headed about the fact that I think this belongs to Taureans.
I am Leo, and your comment makes me think that there is no good reason why none of my 44 birthdays to date have involved petting lion cubs. Making a note for this coming July . . .
It seems like it would be wrong *not* to have a lion party, honestly.
One time I went to pull a kid out of class right when they were about to sing happy birthday and when we got to my room he goes, “Thank god, I HATE the birthday song.” He’s 9 so I think he’d really get this post.
Confetti.
I will never forget the one time I conned my parents into letting me buy a bag for a slumber party I was having. I opened the bag, grabbed a clump, threw it in the air, and down it fell directly, creating a large pile of what is in essence the missing holes from 3-hole punch paper.
Despite many vacuums, we kept finding pieces of confetti for, I’m not kidding, YEARS after that.
My dad had a shredder that made really tiny pieces of paper. I asked him for a box of it (it was like a 6×6 box) and used it for new years confetti. We threwTHE WHOLE BOX! I had to spend the next week vacuuming, and yes, my mom found some more of it when she moved like 5 years later.
Feel that you are wearing a foreign object atop your head. Marvel at the things we can get used to, the things we accept because others before us have accepted them, no matter how little sense they make.
This is my cat’s life. My main source of entertainment is putting things on Gomez’s head. He is so great and patient and it’s not my fault that coke bottle caps look like little fezzes.
Can we have pictures of this please?
He is also so chill. Neither of my cats would stay still enough for me to put anything on them, let alone balance it on their head. 🙁
On my 8th birthday I locked myself in my parents bedroom, sobbing, and informed them that I refused to get older, that I refused TO DIE. I also got a Beauty and the Beast puzzle (Little Mermaid was my favorite).
I feel this post.
Are you Kelsie?
There was a roller rink where I grew up that had a giant skate kids would ride in for their birthday parties. A bunch of little kids wearing roller skates would try to push that heavy fucker around the rink while the birthday kid sat in it like a monarch. The roller rink would play a very slow version of the birthday song while the children toiled. The song had a huge gap of silence for the toilers/party goers to scream the name of the birthday monarch.
I desperately wanted a birthday party there.
Still bitter about not getting to ride in the giant skate. I bet it smelled like feet.
I was going to use a gif, but I didn’t think that would convey the fact that I am, in real fact, crying from laughter at this. Thank you.
Excellent! I do what I can. 🙂
Balloons are terrible and I will not have them at parties. According to my parents, when I was a baby one popped in my face, leaving me frightened of them as a result; whatever the reason, I am scared of loud bangs (fireworks are awful) and the sight of balloons puts me into a state of hypervigilance, because I know they could pop at any minute. (One party, outside in the hot sunshine, had balloons popping seemingly at random due to the heat; I have also been at a party in a room with very hot radiators, where my constant fear was that a balloon would land on one and burst.) It is worst when there are small children, because you just know that they will squeeze the balloon too hard or fall on it and burst it, and then they will cry, and it will just be terrible all round.
Tear a corner of the paper and pull until it’s ripped halfway across the box. Pause. What is another object to add to the pile? We fill our hearts with material goods, and still our hearts are empty.
Well, this just sounds like my mother. (She always says she doesn’t want birthday/Christmas presents, because she has “too much crap” already. Which is understandable, but it is nice to be able to give people things.)
The thing with the balloons also plagues my boss. She is an event planner, this is not a comfortable combination.
I also hate balloons for that exact ‘could pop at any moment’ reason. My parents were called to many birthday parties to rescue me from that awful ‘sit on a balloon to pop it and get the treat inside’ game.
I just don’t like unexpected loud noises okay! And really don’t like unexpected loud noises that you know will happen soon, soon, any second now – but whennnnnnnn. This is also why I don’t watch horror movies.
I offer to get under the bed with anyone’s dog during thunderstorms for this reason. You know it’s coming but it’s not here yet…unacceptable.
Yes, exactly! You know it’s going to happen, and it’ll be loud and startling and if there are children maybe they will start screaming, but you don’t know exactly when. And you could just avoid all of it by not having balloons.
That sounds like a horrifying party game. I don’t think I was ever subjected to it, thankfully.
Same for me re: balloons. I hates them.
I was OK with balloons until once, when I was a kid, one popped wetly right next to me and I got splattered. When I realized what that dampness on me was, I was DONE with balloons forever. Even if they were helium-filled. NOPE.
I could have saved so much time at my therapist’s last week by just printing this out and reading it aloud.
I guess now I can stop feeling bad that I never got a birthday party.
Aww! None at all? We should have an online Toast party for you.
I read this in the voice of an eight-year-old Werner Hertzog.
BIRTHDAYS MADE HORRIFIC.
They are horrific.
One of my housemates just turned two and she loves so many of these things with a surprising passion. One of her favorite games is singing the birthday song (to random objects) and pretending to blow out an LED candle leftover from some previous activity. On her birthday she wanted to sing Happy Birthday to her baby sister, her baby sister’s ear, her baby sister’s eyes, her mother’s eyes, and her father’s eyes. No doubt someday she will become jaded and develop high hopes which will never be fulfilled, but right now she would be super pleased to have a single balloon and it’s suddenly very clear why we do all these inane things at children’s parties.
Also she personally invited my husband and me to her family birthday party ( we were talking with her father about whether we would go, and she said very clearly that we should), which was a very future-oriented conversational move for her and makes me feel special. Although I’m pretty sure that she basically likes people in direct proportion to how much time she spends with them and how many of her requests they have therefore obeyed. (Except cats get a free pass on obedience, as is right and proper.)
I ONCE SAW FABIO AT AN AIRPORT TOO!! he patiently stood in line behind me in the regular people lane until his handler realized that they should be in the express lane. I really wanted to ask him to carry me through security.
The only birthday party I have ever enjoyed was the one I held for myself when I hit 50. Invited the people. Cooked the food. Had them with me on the day. I once experienced a surprise party and hated it. Felt terrible because a dear friend held it but couldn’t help wanting not to be there.
Aw, the existential pain of a little kid. Woe. My ninth birthday, I was into horses, so my mom made me a chocolate cake with a brown horse drawn on it. I didn’t have any friends to invite (I was the Weird Kid) so my grandmother, in typical fashion, made it about her and invited a crew of her friends to “help me eat my cake”. Yes, 70-year-olds at a kid’s birthday party. There were no decorations, nothing but the cake. I got one piece of cake and a few dumb old-person presents (like socks or whatever), and then I went off to read until they all left. That’s the only birthday I remember until I was 17. Is that pathetic or what? Man, I hate birthdays.
I’ve had basically nothing but mediocre/terribly disappointing birthdays my whole life, so I had a baby on my 22nd birthday (this obviously wasn’t actually planned – having a baby on your birthday is kind of the worst). Now nobody really cares about my birthday enough to attempt anything that will end up being awful, so I guess that’s a win.
I’M SO LATE GUYS
HAVE WE TALKED ABOUT PENZEYS PERFECT HOT COCOA BLENDS YET
Oh you’re gonna be mildly sad about this I think
I’m not the only one who read this in Cecil Baldwin’s voice, am I?
(Also, long time lurker, first time poster — hello, Toasties!)
I read it in Ze Frank’s voice a la Diary of a Sad Cat.
My parents called me on Sunday to apologize for not planning anything for my birthday. My birthday is in July. I should probably send them this, y/y?
My birthday often coincides with Fasching (carnival) season, which means that I used to have costume parties all the time. Which makes for adorable childhood photos, A++.
Also we don’t do pinatas here, so I’ve always been very curious about them. Hitting things with baseball bats while blindfolded sounds fun! And potentially dangerous. But mostly fun!
Today is my birthday, and it’s actually been fine/pretty pleasant, but I have had some mild issues with people interpreting what I find to be positive birthday things as sad. I brought homemade cake to work to share with my coworkers and they were startled by the fact that I made it myself. No, really, it’s okay! The people in my life didn’t ignore my birthday or make me bake my own cake, it’s just that I really like baking!
Ignore ’em and enjoy yourself! It’s your birthday, so you can bake whatever you like.
(What kind did you make?)
I made two, actually – an applesauce spice cake and a German chocolate chili cake. My dad’s birthday is close to mine, so the applesauce cake was nominally his birthday cake and the chocolate was mine. We both ate plenty of both, though.
Both of those sound wonderful! (Except for what I presume was coconut on the German chocolate chili cake, because of a Bad Experience I had with coconut. Wish I liked coconut, actually!)