Respect Your Elders

My friend Crystal (seen in the picture lovingly throttled by our friend Shaun) is a Christmas Eve baby. Now before you feel sorry for her knowing she has to split her birthday with Jesus you must know that for most of her life she celebrated her "half-birthday", which is to say on June 24th she would have the party and the gifts and all the birthday accoutrements. This would be fine if not for the fact that come December 24th she still receives birthday gifts, plus she's from a multi-denominational family so while blowing out the candles on her birthday cake, unwrapping her christmas gifts, lighting the final menorah candle and contemplating Kwanzaa, the twelfth month of the year proves to be quite lucrative for her.

Now, being the naturally jealous grinch I am (in both attitude and body hair dispersion) I mocked her half-birthday, I sneer at the fact she gets Hanukkah gifts even though she isn't Jewish, and consistently remind her that she is the youngest of our friends and therefore needs to treat us with a little more respect, nay reverence as we are so much her seniors. Instead of accepting this as fact and buying us a round of drinks as requested she has the audacity to proclaim that I am only 9 months older than her. This must of course be met with a huge list of the number of things that have been, and can be accomplished in the course of 9 months. This list must always culminate in the point that while I was a newborn baby adoring audiences of young and old alike, Crystal was merely a twinkle in her parents' eyes.

The language I normally use to describe this fact is a lot more visual but having been my friend for the greater part of 13 years she has known me too long be grossed out by my vulgarity. That is until while visiting her last weekend I came up with this gem in a drunken stupor:
"Hey Crys do you realize that while I was coming out of my mom you were coming out of your dad". This elicited the most genuinely disgusted face I've ever seen her make.

Brava Jamie....Brava!