Happy Birthday to Me

Today is my birthday.

Yesterday I baked myself a cake.  I had decided, since I would be spending my birthday alone (well, with Isaac and Cayenne, but otherwise alone), that I would make myself a cake.  It was a huge baking fail. 

First, I had decided I wanted a lemon cake but it is impossible to find sugar free lemon cake mix, so I bought a sugar free yellow cake mix and some lemon extract.  I bought lemon frosting.  When I was baking the cake, though, right after I'd added the extract, I realize I had somehow picked up orange extract, not lemon.  So I thought, OK, I'd have orange cake with lemon frosting.  That would probably taste OK, still, right?

Then the cake stuck to the pans.  I used non-stick cake pans AND I remembered to spray them with non-stick cooking spray, but somehow they managed to stick anyway.  And I mean, they stuck bad.  So, OK, my cake was not going to be very pretty.  It would still taste the same, right?  Yeah, I guess.

It depressed me.  It was a typical over-reaction, which I have sometimes due to my anxiety and depression and stuff.  All I wanted for my birthday was a stupid lemon cake and that wouldn't even turn out right.  I sat down on the floor and cried for a while.  Isaac came over and lay beside me and insisted on a belly rub.  I felt better, got up, and cut the cake up into cubes.  I put some in a dish, put a spoonful of frosting on top of it, and a scoop of no sugar added vanilla ice cream on top of that, and ate it.  It tasted all right.

Birthdays are  hard when you're alone.  I mean, I'm not totally alone, I have friends... but not a lot of close friends.  And a couple of my good friends live far away.  So I am here, in my apartment, alone on my birthday.  I made myself a cake because  no one else was going to make me one.  I thought about buying myself a gift, but since I still owe the dentist $1,195 for my bridge, I decided new teeth would count as my birthday gift to myself.  But no one else is giving me anything.  No one has sent a birthday card.  It's easy to get depressed and think no one cares that it's my birthday and it wouldn't matter if I had never been born.  But I don't want to go there.