1.13.2005

Birthday time

It's been a while! I meant to write the other night but I have a new computer that isn't properly set up for service yet so every two minutes I get kicked off the internet. Any day now a cd will arrive to fix this problem, I hope. Well, Tuesday was my birthday. I've never been a huge birthday person, unlike my friend Mary at missmaryb.blogspot.com, who celebrated even her half-birthdays into college. Not to slam that, it's just different.

This year I moved some furniture and then went to work on my 26th birthday - which is a really useless birthday by the way, it's not a multiple of 5 and it's way beyond getting to do anything new like drink or go to casinos. I was blessed at my first job managing a restaurant out of college to have an awesome staff that often felt like a family. That family atmosphere was usually a huge blessing although there is also the drama and gossip of a family involved too. Anyway, that aspect of the job was great and when I left I wondered if that would ever be replicated somewhere else.

After a month of training for my new job I was placed at a restaurant that already had that sort of family atmosphere going and I happily fit right into the culture. I love where I work right now, most of the time, and I can't say enough for how fun it is to work with people who generally like their job and care about the people they work with. This is sort of a tangent out from my birthday but they bought me pizza and made a poster that wished me happy birthday which was really cute.

That night when I got home there was a Mexican-style birthday cake on the table at my house. Mexicans have a very interesting birthday tradition. I first learned about this about a year ago when my then-boyfriend and I went to a birthday party for one of his friends. When it was time for cake the birthday person stood in front of her cake looking around nervously (I wondered why). The onlookers sang a song and then started chanting "Mordita" over and over, which means "a little bite" or something to that effect. (I was confused). Then the birthday girl leaned over and took a little bite out of the edge of her cake, at which time two of the onlookers' arms appeared out of nowhere to quickly push her face into the cake. This is followed by pictures of the caked-face, laughing and of course, the caked-birthday person trying to quickly get the frosting out of their nostrils. It's actually a pretty amusing thing to watch.

Anyway, when I saw my cake the other day I immediately knew I was going to have to take a "mordita," being in foreign territory here. So, I made everyone stand as far away from me as possible, especially my husband, made my wish and bit my little cake. Unfortunately I was not nearly fast enough to avoid my husband reaching over the table and giving me just enough of a push to get frosting in my eyelashes and up my nose. (He said later he's had a lot of practice at stealth birthday-cake pushes). Well, that's life I guess. It was funny to become so involved in a tradition so foreign to me. Everyone treated me like one of them and like it was the most normal thing in the world for me to bite the cake. And, that was my birthday.