Happy Birthday To Me

None of my friends will remember that it's my birthday, because none of them live here. So depressing. My family is very unlikely to call either. We're more email based. And Boyfriend didn't get me anything because shopping for me freaks him out, although we are going to pick something out together tomorrow. But going out and having somebody pay for things for you makes you feel different than just receiving a preselected present.

Boyfriend's birthday was yesterday, and he has never moved more than 5 miles in his entire life, so all his friends and family are right here, so they all remembered and they all called.

Now I would like to take a moment and selfishly bitch about how going out to celebrate last night turned into this total disaster.

So B's mother has been wanting to see Borat for a long time. We tried to go see it for her birthday about two weeks ago, but she didn't get tickets in advance, and she had decided we should go to, like, the smallest theatre on earth to begin with, so it was sold out for basically the entire night when we got there.

Now B is not very picky about how he spends his free time, so he readily agreed to go see Borat last night, but I thought it was pretty obnoxious that she foisted her movie on him when it's his birthday and what he actually wanted to see was The Departed. I must point out though that he didn't ever bring that up, since he knew she wanted to see her movie and she was paying. So we'll let that slide.

Anyway, she called at 10am to confirm and said that the movie was at about 5:15 and we would go to dinner after. That sounded fine. We went to work on the house all day. We were on our way home at 4 to shower quickly (since we were covered COVERED in plaster dust) when his mother called back to say that the movie was actually at 4:50. Getting to that movie would have necessitated going covered in plaster dust. It seemed odd to both of us that you would give someone less than an hour's notice about an almost half hour change in time. But whatever, we rescheduled a little and decided to go to dinner first at 6 and then to a 7pm movie.

We got home, showered, and found a voicemail at 5:30 as we were leaving from his mother saying that the restaurant was closed. Rather than calling to make a reservation, she just showed up at the restaurant half an hour early. Since we were pressed for time, she said, we would just eat at the next closest open place. Fortunately, that wasn't a McDonalds, or a college dorm cafeteria, or whatever, but still, it just seemed like such poor planning to drag someone out on their birthday, make no firm plans whatsoever, and then keep calling to change things at the very last minute.

So the NEW new plan was to go to the sushi place across the street. This would normally be fine, because I like sushi, except that there are two MUCH better sushi places about two blocks up the street. As we got in the car, I asked B to call his mother and tell her that we would just meet them at one of those places instead, since it doesn't make sense to eat at some random place when there are good places about two inches away. But apparently his mother, like my mother, in some ongoing fit of anti-technology, operates a cell phone by turning it on, placing a call, and then turning it back off. So we had no way to get ahold of her and we just went to the crappy new restaurant.

Now here's the part that actually bothered me a lot. We walked in at precisely 6 - the appointed hour - and his mother and two brothers were sitting there chowing down already. I mean hello, that would be shockingly rude on any occasion, but my semi-Southern inner belle fainted dead away on finding that they would do that to someone on their birthday. And it's not like we were late - they were early, by (poorly made) choice.

It turned out that they had ordered a bunch of stuff "for the table." His mother always wants to do that and I totally hate it. She is itty bitty, so she just likes to pick a little at everyone's stuff, which I suppose is fine, but I tend to like to order something I want and then eat it. We're always ending up getting a bunch of appetizers and then each having one bite, which is totally not enough for anyone but her. Plus, I don't eat meat, and everyone else always wants meaty meat with blood sauce, so it ends up that I get like one bite out of the whole thing and I feel like I'm being greedy if I try to take a second bite of the one thing I can eat. And no one ever says anything when she suggests it, and I'm always the only one who's not family, so I don't think I should be complaining.

Anyway, there was an icy cold bowl of semi-eaten miso soup for us to share as an appetizer. Then a sashimi boat arrived. That's when I realized that they had actually ordered the entire meal before we got there - not just some appetizers to tide them over. I obviously don't eat sashimi, and neither does B normally, since that's just not what he likes. So we both ordered some stuff that we actually wanted, which made us both feel bad cause obviously it was getting really expensive at that point. I would like to put the blame for the boat squarely on B's totally selfish older brother, because he is the only one at the table that touched the sashimi, so it was clearly his idea.

Since we ordered about half an hour after they did, our stuff took forever to come out, so it was like two entirely separate meals. Although it was nice that everyone else was already full so no one tried to steal my food. As we were finishing, his mother looked at her watch and was like "oh, the movie is starting." We were like wait, you mean we need to get the check and leave right now? But no, she meant that the movie was actually, literally starting, because the 7 o'clock movie turned out to be at 6:45. Argh!! So we crammed the last bits of our food down our throats and, chewing madly, ran down the street to the theatre. Where we then had to wait in line for tickets, because, despite the fact that we missed it just two brief weeks ago due to the ongoing wild popularity of the movie, we had apparently not learned our lesson.

Fortunately, we didn't miss anything cause of all the stupid previews & the movie turned out to be really funny. I haven't laughed that hard since Harold & Kumar. I think I may have actually screamed with laughter at the last Pamela Anderson thing. There was definitely some kind of shreiking coming from my immediate vicinity.

In closing, I would like to point out that Boyfriend's mother is a very nice lady, she's just a little flaky.

But all in all, I give the evening 4 argh!!!'s out of 5.