micah takes photographs

last you heard, my birthday was about to happen. i’ll admit i didn’t expect much. everyone gets lots of birthday wishes on facebook (and i haven’t thanked anyone yet – it might be too late now), but mostly i expected a lazy day, hanging out & watching movies or something. dana came over & made me a pretty elaborate breakfast, acting restless the whole time. she couldn’t stay long, she said, because she had an interview she had to go to. before she left, though, she read me this strange text message she got. something about “where can you go to get spaghetti, & video games, all for the price of a tooth?” i immediately did not understand “for the price of a tooth” but thought “spaghetti & video games? rizzo’s house? why the heck would dana get such a cryptic text message about rizzo’s house?” so i told her to just ignore it – what a weird text message. she persisted that i needed to solve the riddle, and i was like, “that’s not a riddle, that’s just weird. ignore it.” until finally, she was like, “micah – get in my car & solve the riddle to find out where we’re going.” i was uneasy but once she bashed it into my head, i realized she was doing something unusual for my birthday.

we headed to nicks house, which was a surprise, honestly. by the way, i once chipped my tooth on nick’s couch, so that’s that. he wanted to take my golfing for my birthday. though it had just started raining, so we opted to play a golfing video game instead, while dana went on her interview. a few hours later, nick was like,

“ok time to go.”

“what? where we goin??”

dana was already sitting in the driveway. they gave me another riddle. we ended up at the high school parking lot, where shane was waiting with a cocktail for me. apparently, they wanted to have me drinking all day, from breakfast to bedtime. then all of a sudden we were at shanes house. then all of a sudden we were meeting missy at the erie canal – at this point it’s pouring – and she made me a caribbean rum drink in her car. that must be it: missy, shane, nick, dana. but nope, then we started going to skaneateles. mind you, i’m having to solve riddles for all these places. what the heck could be in skaneateles?

we get there, go into this bar i’ve never been into, and heather & mick were there. they immediately threw a car bomb down my throat, because those two introduced me to car bombs. immediately we were leaving, and they gave me the final riddle, which took us to the dinosaur bbq. we ate a little, drank a bunch, and i was pretty drunk & outgoing by then. heather & mick really wanted to drink more at dana’s work, so we went to kitty hoynes for a little while, though i don’t remember it that well.

the reason i’m telling you all this is because that weekend, a day or two after my birthday, heather & i got into this really stupid argument, and haven’t spoken since. i’m still a bit angry about it, and it honestly was the majority of what i remembered from my birthday weekend. but i wanted to remind myself that that wasn’t the majority of my birthday this year, that the majority was how much trouble my girlfriend went thru to give me a giant birthday surprise, and how my friends all came together to do really nice things for me. i’ve been too down lately, and i wanted to remind myself to look on the bright side.