Sad Faced Boy

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Thursday, February 08, 2007

HAPPY 30th YOU GRUMPY BASTARD
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My mother-in-law best expressed my thirtieth birthday in the following phrase: "Happy birthday, a third of your life is now over." Yeesh with in-laws like that who needs, well who needs in-laws to be honest. Then again my father-in-law is my go to man when I start throwing adult tantrums from home improvement woes so maybe in-laws aren't all that bad. Thankfully I have Animal Crossing and Animal Crossing didn't let me down. No sir, nope not one bit. I got a birthday cake and letters with presents, and, and, and.... Oh fine I know it's not real but it was a nice gesture even if the cake they gave me was missing a piece (filthy stinking furry bastards).

My thirtieth. I almost thought that on waking up my body was going to fall apart like a car the day after it's fourth year of ownership. Fourth year? Yes well for the longest time my family drove Fords where on the fourth year right after the last payment all hell would break loose. Whether this was a characteristic of Fords or of cars in general who knows but I'm leaning towards the former. I may have thought that my bodies warranty was going to run out because I kept remembering a conversation with an older friend of mine and his wife about how their bodies hurt more now then they used too. Then again the friend in question is sort of a cranky old grandma cat so I'm not sure why put much stock in that.

None of this falling apart happened. Instead I took the day off went over and ran my fastest three and a half miles to date and grabbed a bite to eat at my most favorite quirkiest restaurant in town. Taking the day off wasn't so much because of my birthday but because I wanted to get lunch at Starliner Diner and Starliner isn't all that close to where I work. Ahh Starliner Diner. Starliner has to be one of the tastiest, cheapest restaurants in town and is by far one of my most favorite places to eat. The cuisine? Tasty cuisine. Seriously it's a weird mix of Cuban, Mexican, and Texan (Is Texan really a type of food?) where the portion sizes are huge the cost of an entree is about $9 and the decor is dirty. I don't know what the bathroom looks like and I hope to God that I never drink enough coffee or Margaritas to find out. Starliner is the only place where I would rather substitute black beans or skillet vegetables than eat catchup with french fries. It's not that I love french fries so much as I like catchup. If God had a favorite condiment it would be Catchup.

Lunch was followed by a visit to Best Buy and an enraging experience of not finding anything that I wanted at the prices I was willing to pay. I can't figure it out about that place. The DVDs are not cheap their music prices are usually undercut by Target or Circuit City, their electronics selection is poor, their computers are overpriced and their selection of audio gear pathetic. Enraging, always enraging and yet I still go back expecting something different. Oh the pain.

I spent the rest of my day playing Animal Crossing in front of our fire place while watching snow gracefully fall from the sky. I also tried to read "On Bullshit" by Harry G. Frankfurt, sanded a wall and shoveled the then not so graceful and much more tooth grinding snow from the driveway. Who says one's thirtieth birthday doesn't have to suck.

"On Bullshit" was one of those books where I was deluded myself into thinking that it would be really relaxing to take a stroll through the conversation of some philosophy majors while they discussed what "bullshit" is. My stroll turned out to be much shorter than I would have liked as I hit a fork in the path and got confused on what I should do. Instead of choosing a fork I just turned around and went back to my car but then couldn't remember which car was mine.

Maybe my frustration and confusion had something to do with having to look up a word every other page. Maybe this would be OK if the book were of a normal hard bound book size but when the book is the size of a pocket dictionary with the font-size of a children's book it just becomes painful. I'm not sure what I was expecting when I decided to read some one's dissertation about the definition of bullshit. I think I thought "I saw this on The Daily Show it sounds amusing." Of the words that I came across before I exhausted my teenie little rat brain were pleonastic, perspicuous, and procrustean. By the fourth page of the book I started to break out in a cold sweat feeling more like a person with the duty to translate 18th century Japanese literature when all they had was an elementary school language level. Personally I think it's because I'm now thirty and my brain is already starting to dry out. I figure I've got five good years before all I can do is get drunk and yell "feck" like Father Jack Hackett from "Father Tedd".

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