Little gasps of joy

Saturday was my birthday. I'm 28 years old. And distant acquaintances, upon learning my age, were once again surprised to find that someone as immature as myself is a day over 16.

Saturday also marked the end of an era of sorts for me. My band, Uncommonsense, played our final show Saturday at an outdoor festival in El Dorado Springs, MO, which is where I live. It went well, and the crowd (especially the ever-loyal local high-school crowd) got into it and made it really fun. It was a good final show. The reason it was our final show is that Victor, our front man, just got a solo record deal - as an R&B/pop singer, no less. He's really good at that kind of thing, but we still make fun of him a bit. The others of us talked it over and decided that we would go our separate ways, instead of trying to get another singer and renaming/restarting.

Chris (my best friend and our bass player) and I realized that since the band was the main reason we ever got together any more, we now have to do something that is very difficult for non-sensitive, non-overly-emotive guys like us: intentionally plan to hang out without a purpose behind it. I pray that works, because I know I need his friendship even though it's a bit embarrassing to even admit that here.

Also on my birthday, I got a ton of chocolate chip cookies, most of which came from my mom, whose cookies were mentioned in a previous post. The food of the gods, that.

Cindy gave me a birthday card that I just loved. It was completely random but somehow sweet. I told Wendie about it because she's completely random too, and it seemed like something she would say. But apparently this card is fairly common and she'd seen it before. The card had a photo of a big ferris wheel on the front, with a cartoon of a little hamster. The text was,

If I had a talking hamster, on his birthday I'd take the little guy to the carnival to see the Big Wheel. Upon seeing it, he'd be speechless, simply letting out little gasps of joy.

May your day be filled with little gasps of joy.

My day wasn't, as it turned out, filled with little gasps of joy, because I was dealing with little crises all through the day at the aforementioned music festival. But Cindy does more than anything else I can think of to fill my life with that sort of joy . Oh, and I did give a little gasp of joy when I walked into my house at day's end and saw all those cookies.

Well, anyway, may your life be filled with little gasps of joy.