MadMup.com

The older you get, the less important it is to confine birthday-related activities to the specific day of your birthday. This also works with holidays like Christmas and Thanksgiving, I’ve found. This year my birthday got spread out over several days, and I thought I’d give you a report. Even if it doesn’t interest you, it’ll be a good reminder for me when I look back at it.

It actually started in April this year, with the Sega shirt sent to me by Angie. Unexpected and way cool!

On the actual day of my birthday, I started out with what has come to be my birthday breakfast: a lemon-filled glazed Krispy Kreme donut. I don’t eat them very often, so a birthday seems a perfect time to indulge.

Lunch was spent with my two friends named Beth. (Say “both Beths” out loud – it’s fun to do!) Beth 1 couldn’t make it to the birthday dinner later on, so she treated me to lunch. It was very nice, though I had hoped the best waitress in the world would be at the restaurant – it must have been her day off. Oh, well. (I’m not so sure I’ve mentioned TBWitW before, but I mean to. She’s worth a whole entry on her own.)

Throughout the day I received emails, phone calls, blog comments, and text messages from friends. No one at my job said anything to me, as I’m too new for people to know about my birthday here, I guess. It’s possible they just don’t like me, but I’ll assume the former since I’m still in a good mood from my birthday.

Birthday dinner was at Puccini’s Smiling Teeth, a local Italian eatery. In attendance (alphabetically by first name): Beth 2, Jenn, Kat, Matt, Skip, Steve, & Tammy. These are all people that I’ve met either through improv, or through people I’ve known through improv. The theme: Batman, complete with table covering, balloon tied to my chair, napkins, and foam rubber batarang party favors. While they were setting up for it, the waiter came up and asked, “So how old is the birthday boy?” When they answered, “33” he apparently got a funny look in his eye. The list of presents that follows would only further that look in his eye, I think:

• A framed Batman Begins movie poster, the really cool one where he’s standing in silhouette. (I’ll try to get pictures of some of these things later.)
• A cheese shaker that was used on the actual set of Seinfeld. (This actually hasn’t arrived yet, but I received the printout of the screen showing the winning auction.)
• Flowers. Actual flowers!
• A tricked-out Hot Wheels dairy delivery truck
• A knick-knack of two carved kitties sitting on a little couch
• A picture done using wires and tacks on black velvet of a Model T. This one is the most difficult to describe and needs to be seen.
• A Yoda Pez dispenser

Looking at that list you can make one of a couple of assumptions: either people don’t know what to get me so they err on the side of giving something they might think is funny or they know me exactly and got me things they knew I would love. (I’ll give you a hint: it’s the second thing.)

Saturday was spent with my family. My mom, dad, brother, sister-in-law, niece, and nephew all had come down the night before, but got in pretty late, so I didn’t see them until Saturday. We went to Historic Prophetstown (“Historic Prophetstown is a 300-acre site incorporated in Prophetstown State Park. It is dedicated to the preservation of agricultural, environmental, and Native American heritage. A 1920s farmstead, a restored prairie, and a developing Native American village help to interpret the stories. Learn Native American stories and lore… walk or enjoy a horse drawn ride through the prairie… visit the 1920s farmhouse… participate in the special programs and events… all at Historic Prophetstown!”), Wolf Park (this was the coolest thing – all sorts of wolves, and we got to hear them howl!), and the Tippecanoe Battlefield, with a stop at McDonald’s for lunch.

Dinner was hosted at Kat’s, with Matt in attendance. This was meant to introduce my two families to each other, and it went very well. Afterwards, my sister-in-law said, “Your friends are very funny.” I replied, “Well, we are in an improv group together…”

A few games of Scrabble later (I won two of them) and I said goodbye to the family for the night and went to Wal-Mart with Matt and Beth 2. We might have been after some last-minute Mother’s Day things, but you’ll never get me to confess to it. We did, however, follow it up with some Jell-O Oreo pudding. Mmmm.

List of gifts received on Saturday:

• Money. (A gift that never goes out of style.)
• A T-shirt with the caption “It’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye” wherein two characters are playing keepaway with a third character’s eye.
• Superman lounge pants
• A suckao kit – basically a way to prepare super-rich hot chocolate. It’s Ecuadorian and was sent to me by an Australian friend. I feel so international!
• Lego Star Wars PC game. Technically this wasn’t a gift, it’s for review, but it came during my birthday weekend and looks like fun, so I’m counting it.
• A card from my grandma. She’s finally stopped sending money, and I’m glad. Any time she did, I always felt guilty.
• A limited edition print of the last Batman drawing Bob Kane (creator of Batman, don’t ya know) did before he died. Wow with the awesome.

Mother’s Day lunch was at Texas Roadhouse with the family before they headed back to Wisconsin. The end of the day was spent with friends with the weekly viewing of Desperate Housewives (yay, Susan & Mike!).

On Monday, I received a birthday card from the staff at one of my old schools. Tonight I’m going out to eat with a friend from one of my old schools. That’ll just about wrap up a solid several days of birthdaying.

I’m surrounded by good people. Thank you, everyone who had a part in my birthday. You all have a place in my heart.

I close with the lyrics to Older, by They Might Be Giants:

You’re older than you’ve ever been.
And now you’re even older.
And now you’re even older.
And now you’re even older.
You’re older than you’ve ever been.
And now you’re even older.
And now you’re older still.

TIME! Is marching on.
And time.. is still marching on.

This day will soon be at an end
And now it’s even sooner.
And now it’s even sooner.
And now it’s even sooner.
This day will soon be at an end
And now it’s even sooner.
And now it’s even sooner.
And now it’s sooner still.

You’re older than you’ve ever been.
And now you’re even older.
And now you’re even older.
And now you’re even older.
You’re older than you’ve ever been.
And now you’re even older.
And now you’re older still.

I really want you to like me. I don’t like finding out that you don’t like me, for whatever reason. I realize that it’s usually something I’ve done to cause you not to like me, but I still don’t like it. I want every one of you to like me.

I realize that’s foolish. The more people you know or who know you, the more likely it is you’ll have more people who dislike you. Celebrities have fan clubs, but you’re just as likely to find a large group of people who despise them. You’d have to have thick skin to be a celeb, I think. I don’t think I’d be any good at it. I’d read that reviewer who disliked me or something I did, and I’d totally call them up and take them to lunch and try to fix it.

I used to do things to get people to like me – change myself in some way, hide parts of me that I thought they might not like. It usually worked… for a while. It’s kind of like those pictures in menus of desserts. They look delicious and creamy and wonderful, but the reality never quite meets up with the picture. I don’t mean to imply that I’m delicious, creamy, or wonderful, I’m just saying that the picture and the reality don’t seem to mesh. I could get testiomonials, if you need them…

It’s happened a few times to me, though, that someone has met me – the actual, not-put-on me – and stuck around, even chosen to hang around more. You know that image you have of yourself that you get reflected from the people who picked on you in grade school? Mine doesn’t jive with people choosing to spend time with me. That’s not what I want to focus on, though.

Here’s what I take from that: it’s more important to be me than to change myself for others. If you like me like I want you to, I want you to do it because you like the actual me. Granted, here online you don’t get all of me – I specifically leave a lot of myself offline. You can piece a lot of me together from what you read here, but not the whole me. That’s actually the problem with onlineness, some feel. You never know who that other person really is. They could be a spleen stealer, an albino turkey farmer, or – gasp – a 32-year-old computer technician. You just never know, so it’s best to be careful.

All this isn’t to say that you don’t change when you get to know people. Certainly not. There’s a theory floating around my current circle of friends that you take something with you from someone who has been significant in your life, whether it be the way you fold your towels or the fact that you eat chicken fingers at particular restaurants now. But it’s more than that. The thing I’ve had changed most drastically (and often) is my viewpoint.

I’ll just give you one for-instance, though I could list a bunch.

I do things I like, nothing more, nothing less. I’ve already decided on what I like in most areas, even if I don’t have much (or any) experience in the area. It’s never been easy to get me to do things I didn’t want to do. “Set in my ways” and “stuck in a rut” are phrases that have been applied to me more than once. Lately I’ve found myself trying things and doing things I never imagined I would. Like, I ate cactus a few months ago. It wasn’t good and I won’t do it again, but I tried it. That might not sound big, but for me, it is.

The problem is, you can’t ever get across to that person who helped change you just how much they’ve affected you. The outward sign might be eating cactus or leaving your house for a few hours, but that doesn’t really speak to the bigger, deeper change inwardly – that changing of the thought process that goes from “be safe, be familiar” to “try something new.” If you’ve always been a “try something new” person, you can’t understand the “be safe, be familiar” mindset. You just can’t. It’s huge.

Many times it’s not even that person who helped instigate the mindset change who reaps the “benefit” of you changing. They might see you change or try something new “for” (or with) someone else and think that it was that person who made the change in you. It’s almost impossible to show them how important they were in the process, how the process probably wouldn’t have even happened without them.

I’ve long had this idea to do a character I’d call “The Annotated Comedian.” After each joke, he’d hold up a card with bibliographic notes crediting who said the joke originally. The character isn’t totally made-up: I have a Jerry Seinfeld or Steve Martin quote for just about any occasion, and I tend to credit them. When I try to crack jokes, I’m not all that funny. I know because I’ve been told by many and varied people. That conglomeration of other people isn’t really me, and it shows. I’ve been told that when I’m not trying to make people laugh I’m funnier.

I should learn lessons from doing improv: change with the situation, go with my instinct, respond to the other people. The new things I try might not always work, but I should try them anyway. People are going to like me or not, but I want them to do it based on who I actually am.

More phone stuff… You’ve been warned.

It used to be that phones were pretty simple: you called someone and the phone either rang or you got a busy signal. If it rang, they either answered or they didn’t, in the which case you could let it ring a hundred times if you wanted.

They were simpler times, but people wanted more.

First, people were stuck to where the phone was connected. Even a longer cord still meant you had to worry about it getting twisted or decapitating someone who was running through the house too quickly. The answer, of course, was to go cordless. With the early ones, you couldn’t go very far, and the person on the other end could usually tell you were on a cordless phone, but it cut down on the beheadings. The cordless phones have gotten better, and there are cordless phones that let you walk a mile or better with a decent connection still. I’m all in favor of that, but why not just get:

A cell phone. The ultimate cordless. Go anywhere, and nertz to the base station part of it. Drive, eat, annoy people – these are just some of the things people can do while on a cell phone. They’re a blessing and a curse, I think. A cell phone’s the only thing I have, phone wise, but I do like the fact that I can shut it off occasionally.

Phones (both cell and landline) have tons of “features” these days:

• Call Waiting – the most hateful and deplorable invention ever conceived of by mankind. Jerry Seinfeld used to talk about losing the “phone face-off.” You’re on the phone with someone, they get a call on the other line, and when they get back, they tell you they “really need to take this” and you’re done. That’s it. How depressing to realize you’re not the most important person in their life, even if you already knew it. Confirmation can be a terrible thing. I actually don’t really mind if other people use call waiting. It’s fine. I don’t even mind losing the face-off, but I won’t use call waiting. Especially not since there’s
• Voicemail – Best. Invention. Ever. Answering machines were cool, but only worked if you weren’t on the phone already. Now, if you’re on the phone or you’re not, voicemail picks up. Sweet! This is my favorite phone feature of the last 300 years, aside from the actual invention of the phone.
• Three-Way Calling – a cool idea, but potentially embarrassing, especially tied in with the call-waiting. Let’s say you’re a Mob boss and you’re ordering a hit on a guy. Let’s call him “Al.” While you’re on the phone with Jimmy “Fishface” Garbanza, Al calls on the other line. You switch over, talk to Al for a few seconds, then tell him you need to go and switch back over to Jimmy…only you don’t. Instead, you accidentally initiate three-way calling and Al learns about your plans. Then he “flips,” becomes a witness for the government, and brings down your whole organization. See? Bad idea.
• Text messaging – now we’re getting into the realm of “cell phone only” features. This is a good one, too. Want to send someone a note but don’t have the time for a conversation? Text them! “Hpy Brthdy 2 U” can be a worthy replacement for an actual birthday card in this Internet age, and (in my opinion) can be better. I mean, it shows you’re thinking about them right at that minute. A card means “I knew your birthday was coming up, so I got this and sent it to you several days before your birthday.”
• Camera phones – not really a phone feature, more a merging of two neat things. Now I have a camera with me wherever I have my phone with me, which is pretty much anywhere. Now I can take a picture of the truck with “I have magical kung fu powers” painted on it the minute I see it, rather than trying to describe it later to people.
• Games – having a portable game system (Game Boy, PSP, etc.) us great, but not necessarily the handiest thing to carry around. Having a simple game or two on your hone is quite possibly the handiest thing in the world. Standing in line? Play a few holes of golf. In the waiting room at the doctor’s office? Bowl a little. There are even phones that are being marketed (though not very well) as gaming platforms that allow for multiplayer gaming between phones. Mortal Kombat in the parking lot after church probably isn’t the best choice, but is at least an option now.
• Ring tones – I’m not sure why it’s so fun to have a specific ringtone for a particular person, but it is. I really only have one special ringtone for one person, a sort of chirping sound. Everyone else gets “Calico Skies” by Paul McCartney.
• All sorts of other things – cell phones can almost replace a PDA these days (especially if you get the cell phone/PDA combo units), what with the scheduling, alarm, and contact info capabilities they have. They are wonderful and everyone should have one.

Two over-long posts about phones. Weird for a guy who only gets calls from like, five people. Huh.