The Birthday Thing

I’m at an age where I guess I am deeply boring. I get annoyed with the grocery store shelves are rearranged. I set alarm reminders to take my vitamins. And my big dream is to have enough money to hire the junk removal guys and maybe buy a new bed.

I put a moratorium on “stuff” for my birthday and said honestly I’d rather friends just contribute to the junk removal thing. Gift money that I don’t have pay a bunch of tax on. Krista suggested a little fundraiser, Dina thought that was great. It’s two weeks until my birthday and I started stressing about it–I have trouble even sending invoices to clients asking for money I’m owed, so “Hi, please give me money” for my birthday seemed extremely weird. But it’s been a struggle to try to get on my feet, there are all these big things far outside my budget, so I made some initial vet appointments and forced myself to do it. The old broken treadmill has been sitting in my hallway for over a year now and it’ll be there two more if I don’t do something.

I did this yesterday.

This is today.

No I don’t even know wtf is happening.

I’m having a lot of feelings and it’s uncomfortable.

I’ve got a spreadsheet going–the bed I wanted is down in price a bit, so I’m going to get the headboard as well and factored in tax and shipping; I started the big Vet List; I have not looked at laptops yet, but I’ll start pricing those and watch for Black Friday sales in November–and I opened a separate chequing account to move the money directly into, which is mostly to keep me from having a panic attack because I’ve never, ever had that much money in chequing in my entire life. Or savings for that matter. I consider myself wealthy when I’m sitting in low triple digits after paying my bills for the month.

My problems feel deeply unworthy of this help but it’s for the cats primarily, which helps me tremendously, because they’re what keep me up at night, and why my lows have been so low this year. Because I’ve been feeling like they’re all better off without me, that others could provide more for them, and that’s a very hard mindset to battle.

And the world is terrible, there are many worthy places to spend your pennies. This is just folks who wanted to do something for my birthday–it’s what I need, what helps me, and a way to contribute. So the GFM is staying open if you decide to throw a fiver my way for my birthday, and I will not buy magic beans with it, although a friend talked me into getting a “My job is Beach!” Ken doll (he’s on sale! for $22!) and I got a celebratory mocha frapp today when I went out to get my vitamins. I am very boring.

I’m also still flabbergasted and there might have been tears but I will deny it if you ask me.

I keep wanting to say deeply inappropriate jokes that would make people uncomfortable to deflect from feelings right now, so I better get myself offline and go back to work.