Birthday Bliss

A short, cautionary tale about the power of cupcakes, gridlock & guilt

Screw it, I gotta set myself free, I must confess. This past weekend, I…

Last but not least…

Wait.

Before I confess, let me give context:

This past weekend was my 52nd birthday. My husband had to travel out-of-town so we celebrated early. A nice dinner, nice wine. Lovely.

On my actual birthday, I got a hankering for cake. [Disclaimer: I frickin’ love cake.] The beauty of being over 50 is you can do whatever you want, whenever you want, within reason.

I wanted cake. So I drove to the bakery to get one.

Since there was only two of us at home (I and my son), I didn’t need a WHOLE cake. So I bought cupcakes. Nine, to be exact. Because a dozen seemed… excessive.

Nine?

For symmetry purposes, of course: (3) vanilla. (3) chocolate. (3) chocolate-mint.

Why not six?

Because it was my birthday. If people didn’t occasionally splurge on illogical, unnecessary things, Gwyneth Paltrow wouldn’t be a thing.

Driving home, I got stuck in gridlock. Rainy days in Los Angeles are lawless. To bide my time, I opened the cupcake box sitting in the passenger seat beside me.

    Hello pretty friends. What am I waiting for? Well, if you insist...

So I ate a mint one. 

Then a vanilla one, as a palette cleanser. 

Then, to keep the symmetry and to keep the chocolate one from feeling left out... 

You see where this is going, right?

Cut to: Me feeling gluttonous.

Oh, I tried to justify it —Toddlers eat one cupcake and no one thinks weirdly of it, I’m easily 3x the size of a toddler. It’s the equivalent of one really big slice of cake. That’s not weird. It could be worse, it could be drugs. Drugs are so much worse, I could be doing drugs!

I shut the lid and slid the box onto the carpeted floor, out of reach. Maybe humans aren’t hardwired right? Maybe sugar is the devil?

At home, I rearranged the box, giving each cupcake its own wide berth. When my son entered the kitchen, I smiled, sliding the box towards him. “Got us a half-dozen cupcakes, want one?”

But enough is enough.

I am too old to carry the guilt. I want to confess.

I bought (9) cupcakes and felt bad about it NOT because I ate (3) in the car. (No way! No regrets! They were DELICIOUS.) Eating those cupcakes, in a slumped position, tucked behind the blindspot on my car is not why I feel like a chump.

I feel like a chump because I got guilted into paying the $.99 up-charge on the cupcakes decorated with the “Happy Birthday” script.

Same cupcake as the regular one except someone flattened the frosting and wrote “Happy Birthday” in blue-tinted cursive. And I paid $1 for it.

Why the up-charge? Who the hell knows?! Why’d I pay it? Because I felt bad, like I was being unnecessarily cheap with myself or cheap with the bakery or cheap with humanity, I don’t know. When I selected the “Happy Birthday” ones, I didn’t know there was an up-charge. Only as the server slid them into the box, did she say, “You know there’s an up-charge for the Birthday ones.” Her tone assumed I knew and she was just saying it because someone had complained once.

But I was too… embarrassed… self-conscious… worried about the line behind me… to say:

“What?! Why?! They look smaller, actually. Why would I pay 25% more for something that seems to have 25% less frosting? Did writing Happy Birthday really take that long? Is it that hard? No offense, it’s a bit crooked. Seriously, it’s not like you’re giving away the cupcakes, the ‘plain’ ones are rather expensive on the scale of cupcake pricing, no? Honestly, half of these are for me, the other half are for my son, we both know whose birthday it is, I don’t need to pay for signage. On principle, I don’t like to be taken for a fool, either charge the same for all the cupcakes or put a sign in the glass case because I feel like you’re trying to extract money from me at the end of the transaction, like McKinsey did a consulting study and told you to mention the fee only as you’re putting the cupcake in the box because it’s too awkward for me to ask you to put it back. I know that’s what’s happening in tipping, we’re all being guilted into tipping because it’s harder, emotionally, to ask to remove a tip than to just pay it, I’ve read the articles. I’m a nice person, I want everyone to get paid a living wage. But… I feel a bit violated. Taken advantage of. It makes me want to go home and eat a banana.

Instead, I smiled tightly and said, “Sure, yeah, okay, no problem, thanks.” Like a girl pretending she’s never eaten three cupcakes alone in her car on a rainy birthday afternoon, loving every crumb of it.

To think I thought guilt was for the young.

Here’s to living — and speaking — the truth in the back 50. Better late than never?

---

What I’m reading this week:

Lynn Nottage’s plays. The whole lot of them.

I read RUINED, SWEAT, CRUMBS. Then, VERA. Next up, INTIMATE APPAREL and FABULATION. MLIMA’S TALE is coming in the mail.

Reading a playwright’s collection has been deeply fulfilling. More so than I expected. I see the weave of specific thematic threads across her different plays. The tender hardness of her women (or rather, their hardened tenderness?). The ways people struggle to make it through their lives.

The most unexpected discovery? POOF! A delightful, enchanting short play. I’m not sure how I would have discovered it otherwise.