My birthday this year was going to consist of 16 straight hours away from home, at a bookbinding workshop during the day and working at night, which is what I’ve been doing all week. Earlier in the week the workshop instructor’s assistant had mentioned a bakery in the North End that had spectacular cupcakes, so I asked her for directions, figuring I’d go during our morning break. “I’m going to get myself a cupcake for my birthday,” I told her. I did want to tell someone that it was my birthday. It didn’t seem fair that I was spending the day among near-strangers and no one was going to know unless I announced it.

The room was immediately filled with awwwws. “How old are you?” my fellow students asked me. When I told them I was twenty-three, they seemed shocked. “You’re so YOUNG!” “I’m old enough to be your MOTHER!” “What are you doing in library school? You decided to do that right out of college?” I was startled to realize that even the people I’d thought were about my age were at least five years older than me. I was glad that they hadn’t guessed how young I was. I feel so socially incompetent sometimes that even I am surprised when people don’t take me for an awkward teenager.

“You shouldn’t have to buy yourself a cupcake for your birthday,” the assistant declared. “I’ll buy you a cupcake.” I was startled. I wanted a little attention for my birthday, of course, but I didn’t expect anyone to give me anything. “Aww, really? Thank you!” I had forgotten that maybe it is strange to do things for yourself on your birthday, and I think that proves that I am getting good at this living on my own thing again. I am looking after myself, entertaining myself in solitary ways, and making my own celebrations when I want them without thinking twice about it. It’s not as though my birthday is being ignored, of course. I have gotten cards and calls from grandparents and friends, and will see my parents this weekend. The bookbinding workshop itself was a birthday gift. But all the same I wanted a little something just to mark the day, and cakes don’t bake themselves, so why not?

My birthdays have gradually gotten to be just little family events, which of course is only natural as one gets older. But now and then people surprise me. On my first birthday living away from home, my wonderful housemates somehow remembered that I had once mentioned my love for pineapple upside-down cake, and baked me one while also stocking me up on my beloved key lime soda. And now, my second birthday living away from home, I came back from my lunch break to find that the workshop instructor and assistant had acquired a box of the aforementioned spectacular cupcakes, and they handed me one with a birthday candle in it. I was glowing as brightly as the candle at being treated to an impromptu celebration by these charming people who I had known for just four days.

It is always a bad idea to go grocery shopping while you’re hungry, but sometimes if the reason you’re hungry is because the miscellaneous food in your apartment simply will not go together to make anything that resembles a meal, then you have to do it anyway. So I was at Stop & Shop trying very hard to only buy things that were on my list, and in the freezer aisle I looked longingly at the frozen pizzas and had a brief flashback.

I was roughly five and I was at Shaws grocery shopping with my mom and sister. At the very back of the store was the freezer aisle, and at the very end of the aisle were the frozen pizzas. The frozen pizzas were almost the last thing we passed on our way to the checkout. Every week I looked longingly at them, mostly the Tony’s pizzas in the bright yellow boxes with the happy little Italian man on them, and often I would ask my mother, “Can we get pizza this week?” The answer was generally, “No, honey. Wait till they’re on sale. We’ll get pizza when it’s on sale.” The pizza was not on sale very often.

My parents were very careful with money when I was little. We did not buy many prepared foods, and my mom cooked from scratch a lot of the time. However, they tried very hard to please us children, and when I developed my fixation on store-bought pizza, my mother started to make homemade pizza for us. It was nothing like store-bought pizza. It differed in many ways that were significant to a five-year-old. First of all, it was a rectangle, not a circle. Everyone knows pizza is circular. Duh, Mom. Second, the crust was very strange. It was very cakey, dry, and crumbley. I later learned that this had something to do with the fact that it was made from Bisquick and yeast that turned out to be mostly dead, which is not a great combination. I cannot recall if the cheese and sauce were up to my very high five-year-old standards, as I seem to recall being mostly preoccupied by the shape and texture of the crust.

I would like to point out that I may have been significantly more interested in it if it came in a yellow box. During my elementary school years I was also highly preoccupied with Lunchables in their yellow boxes, despite the fact that meat, cheese, and crackers are hardly a revolutionary lunch idea. You even have to assemble them yourself, making them the least-prepared “prepared food” ever. I can only assume that yellow packaging is the ideal way to market to children. Or at least to me.

Eventually, I stopped requesting pizza. But lessons were learned all around.

By the time I was a teenager, despite the fact that buying frozen pizza was no longer an incredible splurge, my mother had learned to make an incredible pizza crust without Bisquick and with yeast that were alive and well and rose magnificently into a light, fluffy, delicious dough. As I have still never managed to have any luck with yeast myself, finicky little microscopic beasts that they are, I recognize this as quite an achievement.

And now that I am trying to bring my spending to a screeching halt for the summer, since I won’t see another loan check until September and some unexpected expenses have come up and I am still trying to pick up more hours at work until classes start again and it will be tricky to avoid digging into my savings, it is comforting to really understand how easy it is for me to do without eating out, buying sweet delicious Starbucks coffees, drinking soda, and always grabbing something from the snack machine or convenience store during my break at work. To break the latter habit, I made myself a pan of brownies from scratch and wrapped them up individually to take to work on the nights I work late. They do not have yellow packaging, but that is okay with me now, and they taste all the more delicious for costing me just under 40 cents per brownie. Is it that much cheaper than getting a brownie at CVS? Maybe by 80 cents. Is it that big a deal? Not really. Does it add up if I do it every weekday all summer? Sure.

I know, remembering how we lived when I was little, that I can get rid of all the little things that add up, and I know that I’ll just appreciate my overpriced frappucinos that much more in the fall when my loan check comes and I feel temporarily rich again. And until then, I know I can learn to make cheaply at home most of the things that I am going to stop buying. I should probably ask my mom for that pizza dough recipe.

First of all, it appears that the one way to guarantee that a blog post never be written is to jot down the topic on a post-it note. I really don’t know why this is true, but I am guessing that it is somewhere during the “ooh, I need to remember to write this down” process in my brain that I start composing a post in my head, so that part of the writing process takes place while I am trying not to forget, plus fear of forgetting fuels the need to post it in the first place. Having an intermediate step where I write down the idea seems to keep me from ever thinking about it again, so that when I sit down and think “gee, I haven’t updated for a while” and look at my post-it note it seems to take an impossible effort to get all those thoughts back together again.

Second, every time I think of something I want to blog about these days, somewhere in the middle of the process of composing in my head I begin to think “should this really be a blog post or a poem?” knowing full well that once it’s written down in one form the odds are miniscule that it will ever be transformed to another, because once I’ve put words to something the drive is gone for that particular topic, unless it’s a recurring issue or another angle on it. So rather than doing anything with it (or putting it on the deadly, dreaded post-it note) I toss it around in my head and eventually let it go out of sheer indecision.

You see, I have this paranoia that there is some kind of limit to how many ideas for poems I will ever come up with, and some part of me wants to grab desperately at every possibility as though someday I will put down my pen and realize that I’ve finally put words to everything that’s ever bugged me and I’ll have to go take up golf or something. It’s like when I was first learning to sing and I would try to conserve air during a long phrase. It took some work for my voice teacher to convince me that the air would actually last longer if I moved it more quickly, because for some reason that is more efficient. It seemed counterintuitive, but it was absolutely true.

This give more, have more theory is clearly true of my writing as well, because the more I write (and read) poetry, the more ideas I seem to have and the more often I sit down and do it. So clearly I need to stop worrying about conserving ideas and hoarding them for poetry and just try to sit down and write regularly, both posts and poems. And this shouldn’t be too hard, given that I have lots of free time and not much money with which to entertain myself. Either at night when I am battling insomnia, or in the morning when I am sleeping more than I need to and thus probably causing further insomnia, what I ought to be doing rather than being grumpy or lazy is trying to get some of the crazy out of my head by turning it into words.

Which is really what this has always been for—both the blog and the poetry.