Why This Weekend Sucks

I never look forward to Memorial Day weekends. I always feel futile and ill at ease. It may be because my birthday always falls around that weekend. Dear Husband comes from a family that goes all out to celebrate birthdays. I remember one party when I was little, and no doubt presents when I was growing up. But, and it's kind of dreadful to admit because it sounds so emo, but I've never felt it was something to celebrate. I spent the better part of my life thinking that anyone glad to be here had to be nuts, and that my entrance was definitely not something I was happy about. It seemed so much like some sort of glitch, that a divine flunky read the charts wrong and I was really supposed to be back in the undifferentiated whatever that souls come from before they enter bodies.

Even now, when I can usually grab on to some perspective, and am medicated beyond belief, I feel more and more dark-minded as my birthday approaches, and I tense every time someone wishes me a happy birthday, as if I were taking something fraudulently. And I'm angry that I can't shake it, that I can't look on life as an amazing gift instead of my personal version of Kafka's Penal Colony. (Which, BTW, if you haven't read it you should really put in on your list. Criminals have their crimes written on their bodies with needles, and the director of the camp finally puts himself in the machine because the criminals all experience a revelation. And then they die. Yep, I love me some Kafka.)

I'm sitting at my desk at work. The office closed early, but I can't bring myself to leave. When I leave the apparatus of the weekend begins, all the cogs and wheels grind away, and I have to deal with sniping children, laundry, empty time, chaos, cooking, groceries, feeling lost, feeling futile. And I will be one year older, but no wiser.