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My birthday day was spent with members of the family gathered at our house for free food lunch. One of the inevitable lunchtime conversations centered around What Lauren Will Do After College. I had originally planned on responding with the most outrageous careers such as “funeral director”, or “greeting card writer”. My excuse was that the summer heat was making my head throb and the sweat dripping down my neck was my creativity, so all I could do was smile sweetly and say, “I really don’t know.” I’m sure everyone thinks my expensive college education has gone to waste. My cousins are going to be doctors, or members of the academe. Me, I have no fucking clue what I want to do with the rest of my life.

My uncle suggested that I try the Foreign Service Exam. When I was in high school I had romantic notions of becoming a consul, for the reason that I would get paid to see the rest of the world. When I was in high school I also believed in a lot of other silly things–nothing comes to mind right now but I’m sure they were pretty fucking ridiculous. In college, I learned that the Foreign Service Exam was not as simple as answering some written test or coming up with a bullshit essay on the Filipino diaspora or nationalism or globalization. The final test in the Foreign Service Exam is a party. A large, fancy dinner party, the kind where you have to get dressed like it’s prom and you walk around with a glass of red wine in your hand, smiling and making polite conversation with people you don’t know and people you don’t care to know. My uncle proceeded to narrate the story about how one of my other uncles passed the written exam and the interview with all the colors of the rainbow trailing behind him, but he had failed the Party Exam because all he did was sit in a corner instead of smiling and engaging everyone in small talk and basically acting like a sociable human being.

My dreams of becoming a consul were shot then and there. The only parties I love are the ones with a guest list that is composed of my closest friends, parties where I’m free to be as random and raunchy as I want, where my state of gone-ness is fucking entertainment, and where everyone will still love me even though I spent half the night reaffirming a gay friend of his gayness. I can’t stand social gatherings where I don’t know anyone, beccause then I’d have to behave like the nice, safe, likeable girl that people expect me to be and would want me to be. I’d have to go through great lengths in order for people to like me and walk away that evening thinking that I’m a normal human being when the truth couldn’t be further than that. Hell, I can’t even survive a family lunch without repressing the urge to grab a large steak knife and chase my kid cousins away from my room by brandishing it in the air. What more dinners and gatherings with hundreds and hundreds of people sharing the same oxygen in some fancy hotel function room, people from all corners of the world who probably have cultural quirks that will shock even the jaded me. Five bucks says I’d probably incite a war between the Philippines and some small, starving African nation because I tactlessly cracked a racist joke. (I’m not really racist so before you lash out at me for that statement, try to think back at a time where you laughed at a racist joke.)

Then the cheesecake came out and everyone took pictures of me blowing the candle while I made the same wish I always make, year after year.

I actually spent most of the day sleeping. Woke up just in time for the lunch, then collapsed into my bed afterwards, perhaps literally dead to the world as I had some crazy dream about being in some realm of the dead. The air conditioning was on but I was still sweating when I woke up. Goddamn summer heat.

And just because, I thought my friends’ birthday greetings were cute. Here and here.