My Birthday! (but mostly about food)

Yesterday, I turned 21. I am sure everyone reading this knows this because facebook makes it massively obvious that it's someone's birthday. As a result I got about 76 messages saying "happy birthday" and if you visit my page for the next few weeks you will still know that it was my birthday. It made me happy.

Anyway, I'm not a huge birthday person. I feel that there is too much pressure on that one day, much like St. Patrick's Day or Christmas. I mean, if I spend 12 hours reading people's blogs on a normal day, it's not like I'm going to look back and go "wow, April 5th, 2009 was such an unexciting day". This does not apply to birthdays. I know I can look back at Sept 6th 2006 and go "that's the day my awesome new Texas friends made me cupcakes and called it 'Kate Day' and I realized how awesome they truly were!" Anyway, it's a lot of pressure, is what I'm saying.

However, yesterday was really nice and chill. It began with breakfast, where I argued with my Nicolas about whether cold pizza was an acceptable breakfast food. Being French, he did not believe me. I shake my head at that. Then I had my first Anthro Theory class, which I am woefully underqualified for. We were going around the room talking about our majors and academic goals and everyone was like "I got my bachelor's at this random place and I'm writing my masters thesis on the gender and social conditions of identity in an increasingly globalized world of (insert smart word here)" At this point I don't want to admit that I don't have a bachelor's degree, and even when I do it's not going to be the result of writing a disertation on working conditions in Kenya or anything. So I always say "I am on a one year exchange program from San Francisco to explore my academic horizons *inaudible muttering* ANNNND that's all there is to know about me!"

After that, I went home and Mel came over and hung out with some of the 11 people living on my floor. Then a few people left. Then a few people came back holding a cake and they sang Happy Birthday and Gina gave me a lighter with a picture of a really hot guy on it. I got all 21 candles out in one go!

Then Mel and Gina and I went out to dinner and met up with Christian and Annelies and Hannalore where I ate what passed for Mexican food in Sweden. It really wasn't bad once I stopped pretending it was enchiladas and started just enjoying cheesy-beefy goodness. I wish I didn't post that sentence, but I probably won't delete it.  THEN I GOT ANOTHER CAKE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Yes, that required full capitalization. And it was my favorite cake in the world, this Swedish cake that is almost the consistency of a brownie, but still like a chocolate cake, and it has this chocolatey crust on the top and it's kind of like going to chocolate heaven and gorging yourself on chocolate-y goodness and then realizing you're still alive and eating chocolate so you pass out and go back to heaven. What I'm saying is it's a good cake. And apparently I use the term "goodness" to describe food a lot. This is not to take away from the awesomeness that was my first cake. My first cake was a chocolate thing with a texture that seemed like tiramisu. If you've never tried tiramisu, you have not lived and have no right to understand this cake. It was impressively good considering that my roommates didn't know enough swedish to know what was in the cake. It was actually very foolhardy of them to jeopardize my cake enjoyment in such a fashion, but I forgive them because it turned out alright in the end.

Thennnnn, well I get home. There are like 6 people around my kitchen table, like always, so I sat with them. They convinced me to take a birthday shot, even though drinking has lost a lot of excitement for me because I've been doing it since I got here. We all talk for awhile. This doesn't count as a birthday activity because we do this every day. So I go check the mail and I HAVE A LETTER FROM KATIE!!!! I don't know why I keep capitalizing things. I'm really hyper. This letter pretty much makes the last hour of my birthday awesome. So do the other letters from my grandma, nanny, and 5 birthday cards from my mom because she is silly, but I've been waiting on this letter for a few weeks now, while the others are a surprise, so this letter is the gratification I need, and a sign that the mailman doesn't hate me because my mailbox says R. Callard and all my letters are addressed to Kate, which is probably confusing for him.

Anyway, awesome day. Relaxing day. Now I'm off to the waffle buffet.
(I realized that rhymed and almost took it out, but I'm still hyper so I left it in)