Nothing says birthday like TAS

It was my birthday fairly recently and even though I knew that I had friends to celebrate with, I really didn’t want to be excited.

For one, I had about three deadlines on that day - all of which were monsters of assignments. I really didn’t want to be a)working or b)handing anything in on my birthday, so I spent much of the week before at my computer screen, moaning to Laney about word count.

It was also going to be the first birthday I had spent outside of Whitters. From being a kid, my mother has always done the same thing on my birthday; arranged my cards behind the clock, decorated the front room down to balloon confetti at the breakfast table, singing happy birthday out of tune as I walked through the door.

The knowledge that she couldn’t do it this year made her extremely gloomy and throughout the week she made me promise that I would do something worthwhile. The trouble with this picture is that my idea of something worthwhile is being tucked up in bed with the latest copy of Immortal Rain, or watching 300 with my closest friends. Still, I knew deep down that I had to do something - if not for my mother, for the fact that my assignments were almost over.

It was for this reason that in the preceding hours, I spent pretty much all of my time downloading all of the abridged episodes that I could, finding that the more of them I downloaded, the more excited about my impending birthday I became.

I knew I was happy to be nineteen when I woke up at a minute past midnight to a text from Lucy, reading, ‘Happy Birthday, Olivia’, proceeding to recite the song from Madagascar. Deep down, I think I was always excited about my birthday - just didn’t know it until right then.