ricebag's birthday today

"despondent"

... or as I prefer to say - the anniversary of the birth of the first child of MyMama.

Yeah - yeeeeeeeaya - another bleeping year older.

I don't know why but I kind-of hate having a birthday. It's meant to be a day where I can proclaim it in some way and everyone should know, but days like that, like parties-for-ricebag or graduations - anything that puts me in the spotlight - always makes me feel sad. Sincerely, sad. In some strange way I feel alone and worse, lonely. Weird. I always feel best when IT is about somebody else and my own miseries and celebrations are just me, in me, inside me. That is why I want to be tiny. I love to be large - when I am standing in the glow of someone else's moment - but not in mine. I can't tell you the lengths I have gone to to avoid being the "reason".

So I'm just letting you know whassup.

xx

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Yessah ... I write you from my cool air-conditioned shh shh office. Lots and lots of air-conditioning. Lots of shhhhhhhh, noise that is not actually noise, humming that lies just under the radar - not sure exactly what it is - leather-backed swivel seats rolling across marbled carpet; computer hard-drives whirring some electronic pah; the slick sleeves of flipping folders and files; ink-jet printers emitting paper emissaries signalling the work due now, due tomorrow, due yesterday.

• 12 months ago to the day Ricebag was resigning from her job in another shh-shh office and about to embark on 4 months on boats and buses across the islands and highlands of this mad and awful, intense and beautiful country.
• 24 months ago to the day Ricebag was walking down off Mt Sinai in the Sinai Desert, Egypt.
• 36 months ago to the day Ricebag can't remember what exactly she was doing but she was with Finah in Amsterdam, camping by a river with a bunch load of bikers.
• 48 months ago to the day Ricebag was losing her impossible love in the blue blue mountains of Enga.
• 60 months ago to the day Ricebag was solo trekking and rescued by a missionary plane somewhere on the wrong side of the border.

Today is only the 2nd anniversary-of-the-birth-of-the-first-child-of-MyMama that ricebag will be celebrating with her family in the last 10 years.

I want my cake.