A week and a half ago, two days after I vented those negative birthday feeling, I got a cake! It is chocolate and delicious. However, there was no name on it. There was no return address, the billing slip didn’t have the purchaser’s name, and birthday card is only signed “Your Friends.”

I’ve asked a few people about it, wondering if they sent it to me. No one has fessed up! Please, if you sent this to me, tell me who you are.

If you don’t… well, I guess I just won’t know. I want you to know how happy you made me, and that I’ve been enjoying your wonderful gift since I got it. Thank you.

I turned 30 today.

Most 20-somethings go into their 30s kicking and screaming. Some regard it as just another day. My reaction was different.

When Nadia turned 30, she threw herself a wonderful little party. Family and friends were there with her. She went into her 30s with a smile on her face and surrounded by family.

I went in tears.

My mom called me today, singing “Happy Birthday.” I started crying, as quiet as I could. An overwhelming sadness hit me, and I can’t quite put my finger on what it was.

A steady stream of phone calls and SMSes came in, the first at 5:15am from my aunt.

During the workday, I was a complete tool to everyone I worked with. I was short, dismissive, and downright rude. I silently cursed every coworker that didn’t wish me a happy birthday, even though it is printed right on the company’s intranet page. I did the same thing to my fellow Twitterers and Facebookers who said nothing, despite the hints I dropped.

The workday finally ended. I got a few very nice and overly generous gifts from my Nadia, her family and a friend of mine. I even got a lovely poem from my best friend. But I didn’t fully appreciate any of them, because I was too busy wallowing in self-pity.

I wanted to put together a LAN party with my fellow gamers for my 30th, because drinking Mountain Dew long into the night while blasting each other in Halo sounded like an awesome way to hold on to my youth. I wanted to have a happy hour with my coworkers, present and former, because they all became my friends over the years and drinking rum and coke into the early morning sounded like a great way to celebrate surviving another year.

But I’m here. In the middle of nowhere. I can count my friends here on one hand. My home is my prison.

I kept dwelling on the lack of control in my life. The house; I’m stuck here because we can’t afford two mortgages. The job; as much as I want to leave there is no market here for what I do. Then there is Nadia’s impending deployment; I will be here, in my prison, alone for a year.

Further diving into that endless spiral of self-pity, I looked again at those ideas I had for how I would have spent my 30th if I were back east. I remember my going away LAN party; one friend showed up. ONE. The others were my neighbors buddies. Then I thought about my going away happy hour. My current coworkers were there to see me off, but what about the ones who had quit? The ones that came out for other happy hours? They were mysteriously absent. Actually, not so mysteriously, and suddenly I saw where I stood with them.

(To be fair, one in particular showed up and made me very happy).

All this negativity kept pounding away at me, and I started falling apart. I tried to keep my shit together by working on one of the many computer problems my network is experiencing. Maybe I could solve one and make me feel a lot better! This was not to be; the only thing I’m good at, the only thing I know, computers, and I failed at it.

My dad called. He asked me, “do you have a birthday cake?”

I mustered every ounce of strength I could to sound normal, but my voice did crack. I told him no. I heard it in his voice, his disappointment. He was upset that he couldn’t be her for me, that I was so far away. His voice cracked too. We ended our conversation quickly.

There I was again, crying. No, sobbing. I sat down on my new (broken) recliner, and Nadia sat with me. I couldn’t believe it, a cake. The absence of a cake completely broke me down.

Reflecting on today, and the month that lead up to today, I’m learning that every time I say “I’m hanging in there” or “I have learned to cope,” I am lying. I’m in a very fragile emotional state, and I find myself lashing out at people who don’t deserve it or sneaking off to another room to cry.

I don’t know what to do. It’s been a month now, and I’m not getting better.

I went to a friend’s birthday party yesterday. Most of my D&D group was there, so when all the non-gamers left we started a game of Descent. This is a excruciatingly long miniatures game that tosses role-playing aside and focuses on dungeon-crawling. The site suggests that the game can take up to four hours to complete; after seven and a half hours, we stopped playing because the Overlord (Descent’s version of the Dungeon Master) threw in the towel.

We were just starting the dungeon.

Later on we face a large force of monsters.

During the game, I learned about the French Nameday. I looked for references to this holiday on Google and Wikipedia, but I couldn’t find one anywhere. It seems that if a French person shares a name with a saint, then on their namesake’s day they get a cake. This specially prepared cake has a small animal figure in it; if you find this figure, then you get to wear a crown. My description is pretty vague and kinda sounds made up, but that’s all I remember (it was late and I was really tired).

I found the donkey figure in my piece, and was made to wear the crown:

This image is fuzzy because I haven’t figured out how to take up-close figures on my camera yet.

I was holding the camera above my head at an angle in this shot.