birthday recap

The ‘rents have been deported back to sunny south Florida. The weekend is o-vah! Below, is a listing of the events that encompassed birthday weekend ’08:

1. Concert at the Hard Rock. All in all, it was a pretty fun night. My friend A. suggested going to see Joe Perry (of Aerosmith fame) with my parents as an alternative to a Broadway show. It was a great idea. Rock n roll is their bread n butter. The music was great. My friend A. and her hubby were there for the event and their presence helped relieved some of the anxiety that I usually feel around my elders. Mom gets so chit chatty and thinks she 16 again when she drinks and dad has to stop it with all of the inappropriate sexist and racist jokes.

2. Dinner at Tony di Napoli was the best I could come up with for my birthday dinner. Consider my reasoning… Italian (practically everyone on the planet loves Italian), nice but not too nice, centrally located to transportation, affordable, and I’ve never had a bad experience there. Now, what could your parents do wrong while eating spaghetti, you ask? They were fine, it was my other.

Did you know that I don’t like surprises? Especially when it's my birthday. Even more so when the excuse for having the waiter sing “Happy Birthday” is due to a certain someone being sung to by the wait staff at Chi Chi’s when it wasn’t his birthday, years before I knew him. I can handle being embarrassed around my peers because I am as outgoing and brazen, if not more so, around them than I am around my family. Anyway, I went with it, sheepishly. But, if you are going to surprise me and I get a little embarrassed, please don’t tell me that I can deal with it, because I will tell you that if I shove my foot up your ass you can deal with that.
* side note, the waiter who sang to me at Tony's was a visual carbon copy of a southern-born former box office manager of mine. It only reminded me how bad I am at keeping in touch with people.

3. Monday was ok. I had class in the morning. So, my dad and I talked about going to a museum before their flight and after my class. We talked about going to the Frick Collection. Then we started talking about timing. What time was their flight, when they needed to leave, were they packed, would mom wake up in time to meet me in town by 11am? Important questions. Dad and I decided to play it safe and stay in Queens and go to the Museum of the Moving Image. Why didn’t I check to see if they were open on Mondays? I meet them back in Queens, walked to the museum, found out they weren’t open (um, hello, listed hours of operation?), then we had lunch locally, walked to the Socrates Sculpture Park, had dessert locally, then rented Bug from Blockbuster (which was a dud with the folks). After all of that, them leaving at 5 turned into them leaving at 6:15ish. I couldn’t wait to get to yoga that night.

I'll save some blog space and won't rant about how almost nobody in my immediate family picks out gifts that fit my needs or personality or how I nearly lost it when my mom said that her and my dad were going to their cabin in upstate NY in July and they weren't going to come visit me because of the time constraint, but then 5 minutes later said that her best friends from high school were going to come into the city that week and she was going to go with them. Uggghhh!!!!

Little do they realize that my real present is one they give me most of the year....them living in another state that is more than a 24 hour car drive away. It's the best gift a girl in my situation can ever ask for.