When we are all but thankful..

Turning a year old never really meant much to me. It’s more often than not, just a much welcomed excuse for a get-together with close friends, whom amidst having to pitter-patter quickly in the rat race, had sometimes managed to forget to keep in touch or maybe just have not met each other as often as we had promised to, and yet it is your birthday that they take the pains to organize a time and place to meet-up, and sometimes throw in elements of surprise or in the form of booze? This is the exact reason, why the birthday person is more than grateful when their friends remember and try to give them a birthday celebration that will be as memorable and tantamount as a girl on her wedding day or a guy getting a pat on the back for a job well done from his father. Try as I might to think that it’s just another day, just another year old, just another blow off those candle(s), there are always people to remind me that having friends and family around you on this day is exactly the cause for happiness, for jubilation even, at the thought that people are really that nice and perhaps they think that you are nice enough for them to put in that effort to wish you a very happy birthday. I distinctively remember how sullen and really sad I had been one birthday when I was far away from home, not among my friends, instead I was working, in a city strange to me, and surrounded by what you would call the rough working class, of burly chefs and sharp-tongued men. Picked up my tiny spirit and blew it up like a hot air balloon, by downing just a wee bit of sake, a stolen drink really. And the day passed me by like a breeze, with a joy-brimmed smile plastered on my face. Towards the end of tired feet and aching backs, the boss had turned the “Closed” sign about an hour earlier than should, and gathered us all around. Imagine my surprise when a cake made out of sashimi delicates, spelling out the words Happy Birthday, XXX (the name I had gone by then), were put out right before me and the chef had broken out in a birthday song in Korean. Tempura, dragon and avocado rolls, and free flow beer were accompaniments of this wonderfully unexpected birthday treat. I even had my first cosmopolitan on this very day, compliments of the ever-‘green’ bartender.

This year around, I had another wonderful surprise. For this, it will be marked along with that one before as an eternally memorable birthday. Probably this is not what you would call a general post, suitable for a blog of our genre, but I hope to “inspire” (haha) sentiments of a ‘caring society’ (*eyes rolling*) and to remind us of the joys found in the simplest of gestures.