It's My Birthday and I'll....if I Want to...

"There is still no cure for the common birthday." ~John Glenn

Today is my birthday.

My husband is on the beach in California.

My daughter is spending the night at a friend's house.

I had planned to sit on my lazy patoosh with a nice glass of wine, some expensive chocolate, and a bag of Fritos, watching Nacho Libre or the behind the scenes of the original King Kong.

But instead I force fed my cat. Surprisingly, this activity was not born out of a sadistic desire but of necessity...she has stopped eating. Apparently cats will do that and then they can't start up again. So, to save her life we take something that smells and looks disturbingly like liver pate and a syringe and squirt several plunger's full down her unhappy throat. The whole process has gotten easier, which I'm not sure is a good thing. She doesn't fight much, nor does she throw up any more...but she just sits there and takes it. Not even when I retrieve her from under the bed...she just sits, resigned to her fate, as though even thinking about the struggle is too much effort. I wish she'd struggle just a little for that is one of the hallmarks of a cat--they are loners, walking to their own beat, or at least purposefully not walking to yours. They do what they need to do ONLY when they're good and ready to do it. And they pity the fool who tries to force them...their little razor claws and lightning fast reflexes can shred skin faster than, well, lightning. Our little Peanut was once the best and the quickest and possibly one of the largest of her breed. While prowling out of doors, she would bring home little ex-chipmunks, voles, birds, and mice just to show she could... In the house, however, she became simply The Stalker. I have caught her staring intensely at the oven as though she was trying to will it to turn on. Perhaps she was trying to conjure up her x-ray vision so as to see through the appliance, or attempting to focus all of the ESP energy from her self and all of her cat sisters to lift the giant scrap of metal out of the way of her quarry. Over the past 3 years, she has caught only two mice in the house: one was proudly placed under the coffee table in time for my surprise birthday party last year (And let me tell you, nothing says "Happy Birthday" like a dead mouse in the middle of a house full of people!) and the other we eventually found under the pedestal of our dining room table in "full-ripe" condition, if you get my, sniff, drift.

But trying to make my cat live isn't the only thing I did to celebrate the beginning of my 46th year on Planet Earth.

I also tried to download software from the internet to my computer. I know what you're thinking; you're thinking, "You idiot! Not on your birthday! It's emotional suicide!" Well, I just have one thing to say to you doubters of my technical prowess: Sebastian The Tech-Type Help Guy from Bombay (now called Mumbai) and I are now BFFs--we've even exchanged passwords and interesting data (Did you know that the population of city Bombay (now called Mumbai) and the entire population of Australia are roughly the same? OK Bombay/Mumbai is larger, but only just.) 3 hours, 20 minutes of my birthday were spent trying to protect my computer from viruses and infections. Halfway through I wanted to buy it a condom and say, "Just say 'no' to everyone."

But God brought to my house a lovely 50ish-degree day, blustery and spring-like after several weeks of biting cold while Kevin is in L.A. in the cold rain, proof that, even with everything (big or little) else, I must be his favorite

, I'm going for a walk in my polar bear pj bottoms because no one is here to tell me I can't; I'm having a diet coke and a handful of M&M's with peanuts and a handful of Cheetos too, in order to properly celebrate the me-ness that is.