Countdown to FUN! ( I Hope...)

When I got to work today, I looked at my calendar and noticed that today is the 11th. Which means that my birthday is exactly one month away. Normally, I start getting excited about now, and look at my calendar and figure out which Saturday night would be the best night to celebrate. Because every year on my birthday, I get together with anyone and everyone who needs a night out and drink and laugh and have a good time, and if I drink too much and feel like crap the next day, so be it, because I had FUN, dammit. And much like that fateful night I went out on the south side, I try to forget I am an aging single mother with responsibilities and recapture my youth for a night.

Which in itself is actually pretty ironic, since I’m celebrating my birthday, for crying out loud, and therefore am getting OLDER and not YOUNGER.

Another tradition for this time of year is for me to get bummed out because I’m always afraid no one is going to show up, or I’ll hold a big table and only my brother and like two of my friends will actually come. And I start thinking I am a big loser because I am WAY too old to be going out to bars and having fun. What is the cut-off age, anyway? Does there HAVE to be one? And if so, WHY??

I mean, really. I remember being in my early twenties and going out with some of the older waitresses I worked with and thinking “Gosh, they’re pretty cool for moms!” And laughing when they did shots or got drunk, just because they were SO OLD (probably like my age now) and didn’t seem like people who should be at a bar. And as I got older, I realized that these women (who went out like EVERY night, not just once in a blue moon like myself) were actually pretty pathetic, because they DID have kids and husbands at home, and shouldn’t have been hanging out in bars getting drunk and flirting with Mexican busboys half their ages. All I know is that I certainly don’t want to be like them.

But does going out for my birthday and having fun really make me a pathetic loser? According to my mother, it can. (Then again, she has been telling me not to go to bars ever since I can remember, so maybe I should take her words with a grain of salt… and a margarita! AH HA HA!!) Every year it gets harder and harder to find people to come out though, and to find a day and location that works for people. See, now a lot of my friends have kids and therefore need a sitter, are pregnant and therefore can’t drink, or are sooo settled into the “happy homemaker” mode that they can’t comprehend WHY anyone would want to go to a BAR in the first place (most of those friends I don’t invite anyway, though). And no, we are not as rowdy as when I turned, say 18 (yes, I know technically I was still too young to drink, but I was away at college and had a fake id, you know how that goes…) and drank about 20 shots of everything from Southern Comfort to Jack Daniels to Kamikazes (yessir, I was a hard-ass drinker back then) then switched to beer and champagne and woke up with an ever-so-slight headache yet was ready to go out again the next night (ahhh, the good old days!), but we still have fun. And laugh a lot. For me, I think the thing I enjoy most is being with my good friends (and some family – my brother never lets me down and there always seem to be some cousins floating around) and just being able to let loose. In a mature way, of course. Oh, who am I kidding? I enjoy being able to be silly and get a good buzz and take lots of pictures to remember the night by.

So, hey, everyone is invited this year. You can all crash at my place. Amber, catch a flight from Denver. Fig, Timmortal, take a cruise from the south side. Major Tom, hmmmm, how DO you get out of West VA?? Linda – swim to the mainland and fly to Denver, then pick up Amber. Miladysa, think your husband would let you take a short jaunt across the pond in a month?? Everyone else – get yourselves ready. I’ll get details later.

Seriously, it IS fun. Besides, fun is what you make it, right?? So I guess I’ll NEVER be too old, age is only a state of mind, anyway, right? But please, no hard liquor shots for me. To be honest, I think I am still recuperating from my 18th.

Oh, AND?? I almost forgot!! While I was in Dominick’s (Safeway to some, I guess) the other day I found the perfect balloons for my party!! Look!!

Can you BELIEVE they actually sold these in a major supermarket?? And not in the kinky sex store?? Yes, I HAD to buy them because they made me laugh. “Squiggly Worm Balloons” indeed. You can’t fool us, Mexican balloon manufacturers! You think that we Americans won’t realize what they REALLY are!! Well, you’re WRONG! But I bought them anyway, so maybe I really WILL bring them for my party. Tee Hee!

Thus the countdown begins. Actually, SEVERAL countdowns, the countdown to my night out, the countdown to my anxiety attack over self-esteeem issues, the countdown to figuring out where to go… you get the idea.