{"id":25125,"date":"2021-11-04T21:03:55","date_gmt":"2021-11-05T02:03:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brubakers.us\/?p=25125"},"modified":"2021-11-08T21:05:23","modified_gmt":"2021-11-09T03:05:23","slug":"low-key-birthday-weekend","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brubakers.us\/?p=25125","title":{"rendered":"Low Key Birthday Weekend"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been feeling a bit down lately and so I haven&#8217;t really been my usual jubilant self. This translated into a pretty low key birthday &#8212; unlike previous years when I&#8217;m celebrating my birthday every single day of the month for three months straight until the end of the year. It&#8217;s just weird. Maybe this is what a mid-life crisis feels like? Anyway, I&#8217;m trying to be as normal as possible despite not feeling completely like myself. It might be time for therapy again. I haven&#8217;t done anything because it&#8217;s not really negatively impacting my health and those around me but I do feel strange so perhaps I should do something about it?<\/p>\n<p>But I digress, in an effort to be normal, we decided to have people over last weekend. As you know, my birthday usually falls on Halloween weekend so, whenever we have a get together around the time of my birthday, costumes are usually encouraged. I love costumes but I&#8217;m not one to go all out either so I try to keep things as simple as possible while still trying to be clever. One year I was little too clever with my &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/brubakers.us\/?p=10714\" >domestic goddess<\/a>&#8221; costume idea I kept having to explain to people what I was dressed as all evening.<\/p>\n<p>This year, no one understood what I was &#8212; yet again &#8212; so I ended up renting <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sonypictures.com\/movies\/13goingon30\"  rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">13 Going On 30<\/a> for $4 just so people would see &#8220;the dress.&#8221; I was supposed to be Jenna Rink (Jennifer Garner) and Brian was supposed to be Mattie (Mark Ruffalo), which is a super easy costume for him since it&#8217;s just jeans and a button-down shirt. Brian has outgrown the whole costume thing and doesn&#8217;t really like dressing up for Halloween anymore. Not sure he ever really enjoyed it, though he seemed to a long, long time ago. Maybe we are just old and not fun anymore?<\/p>\n<p>Speaking of the movie, I rented it so I actually sat there and watched some of it. It came out almost 20 years ago (2004) so I didn&#8217;t remember much of it except for the iconic scenes. I really enjoyed watching it again and it even made me cry in parts. And, no, it&#8217;s not because I&#8217;m depressed. Movies have always made me cry &#8212; even the ones that are supposed to be funny. I&#8217;m not exactly sure why. <\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s a preview of the movie for those of you who have never seen it.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"500\" height=\"255\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/5UrCaXLBN30\" title=\"YouTube video player\" frameborder=\"1\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>So yeah, it&#8217;s a romcom (aka romantic comedy) and not a drama but I still cried. But <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Theres-Something-About-Mary-Cameron\/dp\/B000I9VZ1G\"  rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">There&#8217;s Something About Mary<\/a> made me cry too; as did Shrek and a bunch of other movies. I think I&#8217;ve yet to watch a movie that didn&#8217;t make me cry or move me in some way. Even stupid movies make me cry. Maybe in those situations it&#8217;s because I&#8217;ve lost two hours of my life I will never get back. I don&#8217;t know. I&#8217;ll pay better attention next time and try to figure out exactly what is going on and why my face is suddenly wet with teardrops. <\/p>\n<p>At the risk of ruining the movie for you, it&#8217;s a happy ending. She comes to her senses, rewrites her future, and marries her best friend. I actually really like this movie. It had enough funny parts to keep me entertained. It&#8217;s cute and, even though I&#8217;d seen it before, it still made me cry. Happy endings always make me cry. <\/p>\n<p>I sometimes wonder if happy endings make me cry because I don&#8217;t understand how it&#8217;s always the most mundane things that supposedly bring people happiness. The ending showed them moving into a pink house in the suburbs and it looked like she might have turned out to be a school teacher or maybe a housewife and not a big time magazine editor with a fancy New York apartment. Maybe I cried because even though she had everything she&#8217;d ever wanted in her alternate life, she ended up hating herself and wasn&#8217;t happy? Once she realized what she had become, she decided she didn&#8217;t like herself very much, and I guess I didn&#8217;t understand it. I mean, it&#8217;s entirely possible to have everything you want and not hate yourself. Why couldn&#8217;t she be a big time magazine editor with a fancy New York apartment AND still marry her best friend? I guess that wouldn&#8217;t make for a very dramatic movie but it makes me sad that you can&#8217;t have both. <\/p>\n<p>Anyway, I forgot that the whole alternate future thing happens while she&#8217;s in the closet at her birthday party so I thought it was perfect that I watched the movie on my actual birthday. Maybe it&#8217;ll start an annual tradition of watching it every year on my birthday just to remind myself of what happiness looks like because I tend to forget sometimes. Until next time, GNG.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been feeling a bit down lately and so I haven&#8217;t really been my usual jubilant self. This translated into a pretty low key birthday &#8212; unlike previous years when I&#8217;m celebrating my birthday every single day of the month for three months straight until the end of the year. It&#8217;s just weird. Maybe this [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1382,10,13],"tags":[115,2480],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brubakers.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25125"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brubakers.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brubakers.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brubakers.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brubakers.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25125"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/brubakers.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25125\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25126,"href":"https:\/\/brubakers.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25125\/revisions\/25126"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brubakers.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25125"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brubakers.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25125"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brubakers.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25125"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}