April Fools

I was born on April 1st. So was my sister, except seven years after me. It’s also the day our parents decided to get married. Our family has always had a thing about numbers. A series of weird coincidences. The latest one is that Movie Dictator and my sister’s husbands also share a birthday – April 18th -- which is also our mother’s birthday. Like I said, weird.

In Russia April 1st is the official day of Laughter/Humor and the unofficial day of pranks, i.e., you really can’t believe anything you hear even if it’s on the radio or in the newspaper. Yet it’s true. April 1st is my and my sister’s birthday and we’ve often been referred to as 'April 1st Joke' by family and friends.

We don’t often get to celebrate our birthday together, what with my sister living in Seattle and me living all over the place. When we do, it’s great. Otherwise, we end up calling each other several times a day to track the progress of our birthday.

Usually it’s fun. Yesterday it wasn’t.

Now, some people believe that birthdays should be ignored until they go away. Movie Dictator, for example. He claims to not even know how old he is. (I do, but I’m sworn to secrecy and not allowed to tell him.) His one idea for celebrating was to feed me sweets and tea spiked with Ambien, to ensure that the birthday passes like a pleasant blur. No expectations, no hard feelings. I must admit it didn’t seem altogether unpleasant, but in the end I had to reject this idea.

Instead we went to a Korean restaurant for lunch. Afterwards we watched movies, and Movie Dictator allowed me my choice of silly romantic comedies. (Woohoo! Chainsaws and cannibals are out. Gwyneth Paltrow is in.) And all along I tried to ignore the phone calls from my family.

You see, my sister was in Las Vegas at the time, celebrating her birthday in style. She’d known in advance she was being taken to Vegas. But there was a twist to it, a surprise involving a limo, a helicopter, a flight to Grand Canyon, and a lunch. How cool is that, I ask you.

I’m not being bitter, honestly. (Okay, maybe a little.) My point is we couldn’t afford Vegas or a helicopter right now, and I’m fine with that. My point is about expectations. Are they reasonable?

For some reason I always expect surprises and magic and fireworks. Something breathtaking. Growing up, I would tell my parents that all I wanted for my birthday was a brother or a sister. On my seventh birthday, that was what I got. A sister. I guess nothing else could ever compare to that. On my fourteenth birthday, my first one since the brace, I wandered the streets of Moscow trying to find some big celebration (I didn’t). On my eighteenth birthday I skipped all the lectures at my college and spent the morning watching Disney cartoons at a nearby movie house. The birthday after that I was in America. On my twenty-fourth birthday, I had just arrived in Boston and having returned from the first day at my new job, found myself snowed in in a motel. And on the night of my thirtieth birthday, I stood in a stairwell of my apartment building, drunk and terrified, watching an equally terrified mouse trying to climb up the stairs ahead of me, one step at a time.

I guess my nature is to blame. Somehow I always end up feeling a little sad and alienated, even in the midst of the wildest celebration. Or maybe none of my celebrations have been wild enough. Or even remotely wild. Maybe what I need next year is to jump off a plane or climb a small mountain. Or travel somewhere. I don’t like the idea of April Fools’ Day passing unnoticed. Even if it means that year after year, I set myself up for disappointment. Maybe the disappointment is the point.

As for yesterday, it wasn’t so bad. I mean how bad can it be if you get to spend it eating ice-cream from a Russian store and watching a Korean flick called 200 Pounds Beauty? And for the first time in years, I didn’t feel lonely at the end of the day. How could I, with Movie Dictator explaining to me why birthdays should be outlawed.