Charlie Brown Morning

This morning, when I opened Facebook, one of my friends had sent me a message asking when my birthday party was. She said that she received a FB invite to it and wanted to make sure she wasn't doublebooking for that day. I wrote back that I had no idea what she was talking about because I had no birthday events planned.

And then I smiled at the delightful irony of this and my soul began to sing.

You see, several weeks back, I spoiled my father's surprise retirement party for him. Well, I spoiled the surprise anyway. The party went fine. I just ruined the surprise part of it. Still, in some ways having a heads' up was better for him because he hates surprises.

And here it was happening to me! I was getting a surprise 40th birthday party and someone ruined the surprise and that was totally fine because now I could be happy about knowing that for once ONCE I was actually getting a party and it wasn't just going to be some boring year where nothing happened other than me seeing people for Christmas events. I do realize that was a run-on sentence. It was fitting, under the circumstances.

In my head, I start doing Charlie Brown's little dance of victorious joy that he does when he gets invited to a party. To me, it's always just the perfect symbol of being this person on the outside of things who for once actually gets to have the normal human things happen. I WAS GOING TO GET A SURPRISE PARTY! YAYAYAYAAYYA!!

Oh...........

But then my friend messages back and tells me she was mistaken. It was actually the invite for another one of her friend's daughters......the girl happens to have the same name as me.

...........

So instead of the Charlie Brown victory dance of joy, this was more like Charlie Brown running for the football and falling on his ass when the football is pulled out of the way. No party. No gifts. No cake. Suck it up, 40 year old.  This time will be no different than the rest of them.

God, I hate December.