In my junior year of high school, I had a birthday party and invited my whole class. I got really excited and decorated the house and baked a terrific cake and planned lots of fun things for everybody to do.
Three people came.
I would have been absolutely fine with the whole thing
When my mother was a kid, she had a birthday party. No one came. When she went to school the next day, someone had written on the blackboard “Smarty Artie had a party and nobody came but Smarty Artie”.
Kids are fucking evil. Granted, adults aren’t much better, but kids have it down to a science.
This never happened to me; I always enjoyed my birthdays. But at the age of ten, I refused to have my birthday celebrated because I was afraid that it would. It’s a memory that makes me tingle behind the eyes – that feeling you get before the tears come – more so because it is one which I still can’t address as an adult. At 23, I still wish for my birthday to go unnoticed – I’d rather have a Mary Beth of my own.
You’re a lucky man, my friend, and she has it coming.
Mary Beth has probably been in and out of prison since high school, and can’t get a decent job to save her life.
At the age of 33, I hosted my first birthday party for myself (my parents didn’t believe in celebrating birthdays). I boughgt $200 in food and alcohol, and sent invitations that said 9pm. Nobody showed up until 11pm. By that point, I was a depressed mess who had been drinking by himself for 2 hours.
Mary Beth is probably a fat wife who doesn’t suspect anything in regards to her gay husband. But when you see her…have a witness.
hilarious. 🙂 i know how hurtful mary beth’s comment would be. good thing i’ve never thrown myself a b-day party.
My high school nemesis was this (lesbian, it was obvious to me) girl named Krista. I used to practice voodoo curses on her in my fragile emotional state. Then her mom died and I felt better. Then I felt bad and stopped my occult aspirations. I should tell my therapist about this.
Oh my gosh, I just had a dejavue moment… I… I read about this before. hrm… Hrm… Have i?
I, too, am experiencing deja vu with regard to this entertaining story… though it’s good enough to read twice. 🙂
Ah Faustus, your story made me recall one of my own childhood birthday antics, which I recount today in my own blog. 🙂
Definitely read this before!
Maybe Mary Beth is one of those people who now has everything. She could be beautiful in mind and soul. A real giver. If you met her, you might think to yourself: “Ah, this is someone who’s developed from the ghastly creation who I felt taunted me as a child.” You’d then have no option but to forgive such a lovely person. Willingly. And you could live happily ever after. Ahhh! (I like happy endings.)
The saddest childhood birthday party stories I have to share are about me trying to get invited to the parties thrown by other kids at school. I was always left out. I’d get so jealous when I saw little invitations being passed out and secretly stuffed into desks before they thought I could notice. Oh, well. I turned out cuter than any of those fools.
Like all sensible people I have repressed all memories of that period. Children, even the sweetest ones, are uniformly evil. The scope for utter, crippling humiliation as a child makes every adult experience (at least those not resulting in serious injury or death) positively frivolous.
People get worked up about the awfulness of, for example, gay bars: how hard it is to summon up the courage to approach someone, how crushing even the politest rejection can be. And all this is true.
But none of it is anything compared to the withering contempt with which your contemporaries can, without a second thought, sear your soul at the age of 12; with the bitter pit of rejection and despair into which you can be casually pushed by monstrous little brats who barely even noticed you were there in the first place.
Still.
It’s an important learning experience.
And you left high school believing “that people are inherently good?”
Maybe Mary Beth is having dreams of you disembowling her, too.
I believe in karma…perhaps Mary Beth is STILL being left out of social events…and doesn’t even realize why.