Lisa'a Almost-Birthday Non-Birthday Celebration
Lisa's birthday is on Wednesday (the 24th) and she doesn't want celebration."I don't want celebration!" she's repeatedly said.This self-effacement doesn't suit me well. Birthdays are times for revelry and much much self-promotion. (See my birthweek 2004 category). I found Lisa's non-birthday birthday stance to be quite infuriating.The twist of it is that we'll all by gone Wednesday for Thanksgiving. Our only real opportunity to celebrate was last night. So we gathered up Ricky and decided to walk towards Union Square (where we were going to see Sideways) and find a place on the way. It started pouring. POURING. And no place could be found that was reasonable. Finally, we settled on Lemongrass which served fairly decent considerably fast Thai food. (My ginger chicken sucked, but everyone else liked theirs).After this, we had 30 minutes 'til the movie started so we went across the street to Dean & Deluca to have some celebration birthday cake. Lisa and Ricky examined the glass case thoroughly:
The decision was staggeringly difficult. Part of the problem was figuring out what was inside some of the heavily iced cakes. "WHAT'S INSIDE?" whispered Lisa and Ricky like old British people in a horror movie. From the perspective of the cakes, it must have been thoroughly frightening:
Finally we settled on a chocolate purse and a chocolate chip cheesecake bar:
The cheesecake bar was ok, the chocolate purse was really delicious. We made sure not to sing happy birthday. Instead we discussed vegetarianism. Lisa's been a vegetarian for 15 YEARS. We debated whether if she ate a ham sandwich tomorrow and then stopped eating meat again if she could still call herself a vegetarian. It was a fascinating debate.Soon, we were back in the rain heading for the movies. I thought I saw a twinkle in Lisa's eye. HAPPY BIRTHDAY, LISA---HAPPY BIRTHDAY. Don't fight it.
