Good Health To Me, Good Wealth to Me, The Best of Everything

I turned 23 yesterday. If you haven’t yet sent me a gift, it’s okay, I accept belated ones. I usually find birthdays to be a bit anti-climactic. You anticipate it for a while, but when it actually comes, it’s nothing too extraordinary. It’s not like Christmas. Most of the time you don’t even get the day off. You work or go to school like it’s a regular day, and if by some chance you don’t have to, all your friends and family still have to so it’s not that exciting anyways. In a foreign country, there’s generally even less to look forward to. You can’t go out to eat at your all-time favorite restaurant. Your family isn’t there to celebrate with you. You can’t gather up all your friends for a party. But yesterday, despite all that, I had a really nice birthday. I woke up around nine to discover that Despina and Kate had trapped me in my room by roping off the door completely with streamers and hanging Reese Easter Eggs from the ceiling. After breaking out (Kate made me slither out under the streamers), I got to open the presents my family sent and I received “The World According to Mister Rogers.” In case you weren’t aware, I love Mister Rogers. Matthew was a Sesame Street kid, but I was 100% Mister Rogers. Then I checked my email to find lots of birthday wishes, some from people who I don’t generally think of as knowing exactly what day my birthday is, and a really nice card created by Mark. The middle of the day was business as usual, but when I came home from my classes at 3:00, I found the house decorated in balloons. And my roommates hadn’t just blown them up, they’d drawn all over them. There were portraits of me, a picture of a spider with big fangs, a cake (chocolate even!), and a horse (that one’s hard to explain). It was really nice of them. Then I got phone calls from Jeff and my mom. (Later I also got a call from Dad and Mark.) In the evening, we went to Santa Fe Restaurant where they treated me to an excellent burrito and some margaritas. Back at home, we had chocolate cake to top it off. And best of all, there were presents…and presents unlike any anyone else has ever received. I got two homemade cards, a used eraser named Ferby with “I love Theresa” written on it, a marzipan chocolate that had been sitting on the bookshelf for about a week, a tiny bottle of Jack Daniels which Kate got on the plane when the two of us were flying back here from DC, the house’s copy of “The Prince of Tides” which barely has a cover anymore, a mug that we have that usually says “40 and Fantastic” but was altered to say “23 and Funtastic”, and a blown-up balloon that says “This is not a balloon. It is a container for all your dreams…don’t let them pop Theresa. Cherish them.” I’ve never unwrapped better presents. Complete surprises, all of them. It was fun. So all in all, a good day with lots of nice surprises. Thanks to all of you who made it nice.