"Now she''ll be really, surprised by that ironing board cover..."

This may come as a surprise to you (ha!) but Friday is my birthday. The reason that this probably isn't a surprise to you is that I do tend rather to harp on about such things, no doubt to the considerable eventual annual chagrin of my friends, family, acquaintance, and people unfortunate enough to be on the same bus as me in August.

This is fine, looking forward to things is often half the fun of them. The problem is, looking forward to things these days (read: after about my 7th birthday) does tend to end up being more than half the fun of them. You build it up in tiny increments, and before you know it, it's here, and really pretty much like any other day. Which is highly disappointing, and leads to the "post-birthday blues", a relation of the "post-christmas blues" that wreaks the world in late December, early January.

The real problem with this is that I know this. I can see it coming, looming and ominous, like a giant beanbag full of dread, sitting grumpily and amorphously in the middle of my weekend. It's ridiculous, like it doesn't even take me seriously as an oponent anymore. Back in the day, it used to lurk in the dark alley of the post-birthday week, ready to cosh me as I passed with its halfbrick-in-a-sock of letdownness, but since it knows there's nothing I can do about it anymore, it doesn't even have the decency to bother to pretend to hide. It just lurks, smirks, and deliberately irks.

Worse yet, it now flows forward past the beginning of the birthday, like some grotesquely obese person taking up an entire train seat, ruining the effect even of the enjoyment of looking forward to the birthday, like a blog post with too many similes in it.

The net effect of this is that I feel terribly unstable, oscillating between the "yay, birthday!" state, and a state of diffusely frustrated grumpiness.

This latter, I find, is always exacerbated beyond belief by the question "What do you want for your birthday?". There is, of course, nothing inherently wrong with this question, and I have myself been guilty of asking people. The problem is, some people know what they want, and some people hate surprises, and for such people, this question is perfect. For me, however, who has no idea what she wants, and if she did, would hate to tell you, because then there'd be no surprise, it just opens a yawning gulf of indecision.

The thing is, surprises are great. They really are. Not always, you understand, I do hate bad surprises, and I've often felt that a surprise birthday party would be a harzardous thing: someimes you look forward to going home and getting some sleep, maybe reading that new book you haven't had a chance to open, that sort of thing. I can see how, on such an evening, coming home to a house full of people in the early stages of wearing off their sobriety, drunk on a heady mix of alcohol from your liquor cabinet and their success in conspiring against you, going on about how often they thought you were on to them, how they're lucky that you're so silly and unobservant that you didn't notice their plotting, and snickering about you behind your back.... (see how the paranoia of the tired person can spiral out of control?)... one might perhaps not appreciate a surprise party.

Conversely, surprises are really a must in presents. My sisters, for instance, have for as long as I can remember begun saying "I've bought your birthday present" well before my actual birthday. Which, I feel, can really leach the mystery out of the whole thing. Is it worse, though, when someone, 2 days before your birthday says "what do you want? I'm not sure what to get you, and I haven't got anything yet."? I think so. It rather implies a lack of thought and effort. Which is fine, there's nothing wrong with, for instance, a CD voucher, that staple of damn-it-what-does-that-person-want-? present buying.
The ultimate crime though, is following this with "I was thinking maybe..." and then listing present possibilities. Stab the surprise in the neck, why don't you? Now none of those things will be as nice as they would have been, unanticipated. And, if you get something else after all, the person will be disappointed, because they'd been hoping for one of those things which you lead them to believe you were getting.

Aaaargh.

And don't think that going out together to a shop and getting somethng is better. Then there's absolutely no mystery, and no wrapping paper, either. You know how much it cost to buy, and let's face it, either it's embarrassingly expensive, or you could really have afforded it yourself. So why don't I just go shopping by myself for the hell of it? Then I wouldn't be restricted to just the genre of present you were thinking and could buy whatever I wanted. I can see that it's very thoughtful and considerate and you'll-get-exactly-what-you-want-y, but really it's just a step down from voucher.

Furthermore, in my experience, much of the charm of presents is that they're often things you wouldn't buy for yourself,or things that you'd look at in the shop and be indecisive about, or things that simply wouldn't occur to you to shop for, but which, when you own it, becomes rapidly indespensible, which is especially the case with some handbags. (Kathyrn gave me one one which was great, but subsequently broke, which was completely tragic.)
I tend to be bit indecisive when shopping, (although I do believe in erring on the side of caution, and when-in-doubt-buying), so surely this would just load that indecision with weight and stress?

Gaah... I don't know. It's all so complicated.

On a lighter note, here is my favorite picture in the world:



And here is everybody's favourite stick figure, Henry: