Today is the anniversary of my father’s birth. Today, we increment his status from “old” to “old+1.” I wish I could celebrate. I wish that I could give him a hug. I wish that I could hand him his birthday present, sit on the couch with him and talk, roughhouse with him like I used to do, but I am stuck at college. It’s sad for me because on this birthday, I think he particularly needs it. Instead, on this birthday, he sits on my grandparents’ hide-a-bed with a plate and several screws in his ankle, one less toe than he was born with, and nothing but a television to keep him company throughout the day. Thanks to the accident, this birthday is probably his most pitiful. It is probably the theme for my day: pitiful.

I woke up this morning to nothing. Absolutely nothing. No alarm clock, no smell of coffee brewing, no sounds of someone bustling around the kitchen making breakfast, no radio playing incessantly in Ryan’s room, not even the steady hum of computer fans. It was eerie. It was a bad start. The power was out for basically half of the campus’s residences.

When the power returned, I was looking forward to making a big Sunday breakfast like Ryan and I have a habit of doing every week. It would have fixed my day a little, but Ryan was too busy cleaning his room for his family and getting ready for and subsequently going to church to have breakfast with me. Instead, I made cinnamon rolls from a tube, burned them slightly, and sat at the kitchen table and ate mine, alone. I was invited to join Ryan at church, but not by him. Instead, it was Rachel who invited me to church, unaware that I did not know that she was going with Ryan. This felt weird to me. I’m probably making more of a deal of this than there is to make, but it seemed to me like he was passively withholding from me the fact that she was going. It shouldn’t have mattered, but it still felt odd. I think that he thinks that I don’t like church because I don’t believe in God, and because I crack jokes about not wanting to go to church, but I don’t mind church actually. I think that Christian values are actually quite good for the world, and that’s what church is primarily about: teaching people how to be better people. What I don’t appreciate is being asked to place my faith blindly (it would be blind for me, everyone has their own reasons to believe or not believe, but I don’t really have any reason to go either way) in one being or one idea. What I don’t appreciate is someone asserting their own belief as truth. I would have liked to have gone to church today, with friends (isn’t that one of the pillars of church: fellowship?) but I was not even close to being ready to go out into public. Too bad.

It rained. Usually, I like rain. Today, however, the rain sucked. It happened too softly, too shortly, and while I was inside. These three factors lead me to classify today’s rain as: pitiful.

I got some sewing done, but sewing that I should not have had to do. I needed to sew shut a beanbag that I borrowed from Laura, because the seams were coming undone because drunk people think they can juggle. I have come to the conclusion that, in general, they are quite mistaken. About all drunk people are good for are laughs and destruction.

I decided that my knife was beginning to dull again, and that the blade needed a little touch-up, so I got out my stone and began to sharpen it. I have sharpened my knife on many occasions before, with this stone, with this technique, and today is the first day that I have ever cut myself. It was a quite clean cut, fairly deep, and in a high-traffic area of my thumb. It will bother me for days to come. There is a good chance that it will become infected, as some of the powder from grinding the blade got into the cut. Oh well.

The highlights of my day: Pat and I made hamburgers with Frank’s Red Hot and ketchup in and on them. They were amazing. You should make them. Dan came home. I missed him, and I’m glad he’s alright. This week’s chapter in French is about colors, which I personally think we should have learned about 6 weeks ago. Jason and I finished the network lab in under two hours. It was supposedly taking other groups over three hours. Rachel somehow was able to make me smile every time she talked to me, and that really helped me get through my day. Tonights sleep will be a sweet release, and tomorrow when I wake, there better be an alarm buzzing in my ear, the soft hum of fans, and if I’m lucky, the patter of rain on my window pane. I’ll settle for two out of three. Oh, and I would also like my thumb to still be attatched.

Pitiful, yes. My day was not without fault. I felt faintly like crying all day. I survived. Tomorrow I will be stronger for it.