Matt and I usually get lumped together by the family on our birthday, and this year is no exception but it takes a little more planning. My parade people are bringing pizza and cake to Matt’s care centre and have arranged a private room for a tiny, quiet party. That’s nice.

I clipped a quotation from a reviewer in the TLS and find I didn’t record the name. I hope it’s fair usage. You can’t be too careful these days. But I must repeat it here and now because it expresses how I feel about my blog, especially now. Go read the TLS.

“…the wondrous thing about being human - the beauty and banality of it - is that we all tend to dwell in the same handful of elemental struggles, joys and sorrows, which is why a book one person writes may help another process her own life a century later, and why a ‘blog’ by a solitary stranger may speak to many other solitary dwellers across time and space.”

anon (that’s a pun)

Yesterday I didn’t explain the connection between birthdays and hangnails. I was starting to analyze the euphoria engendered by a birthday and the lessened angst of minor annoyances. So first I had to explain Birthday Parade and its attendant magic. Then I forgot to explain how it tied in with hangnails. I guess I was eight or nine wen I figured out that a (slighty) painful thing like a hangnail was negligible in light of the good feeling surrounding one with a birthday.

Everything is relative.

Matt’s trouble is bigger than a hangnail but life goes on, I go on, and so does Matt. He’s hanging on, through boredom and a nagging wonder as to what’s to become of him. His favourite line now is “I’m a trouper”, and he is. They’re setting up exercise programs for him, and there are tests and interviews and games and a few visitors and in ten days he’ll get a lighter cast but he still won’t be able to put his foot down for four or five weeks, followed by rehab.

He broke his ankle on his birthday That’s bigger than a hangnail.

But he’s a trouper.