Unpleasant awkwardness.

I had my birthday dinner at Cass's yesterday, and while I did have some fun, I'm sorry to say that a good part of it was overshadowed with a feeling of discomfort and guilt.

When Cass makes cakes, she makes them personalized. No two cakes she has made have ever been the same, and they usually have some awesomeness attached to them. Before she showed me the cake that she made me, she said, "Before you see this, I totally blame Lez," Lez being an RP character of hers who for some reason likes to flirt with me.

This was the cake:



See what I mean? Awesome cake! Awesome enough that I had to take a crappy cell phone picture and incur the wrath of the picture-text fees in order to send it to myself!

Then she said something that I thought at first was a joke. She said that I had to lick the frosting from the doll's boobs. I didn't really respond to that because, well, joke, right?

Wrong. She was perfectly serious. After people sang Happy Birthday to me and I blew out the candles, she said that now I have to lick the frosting off the doll. This is the conversation that followed:

Me - Uh... no...
Cass - Why?
Me - Because I don't feel comfortable with that.
Cass - Why?
Me - Because I don't feel comfortable with it.
Cass - *whining* Why?
Me - *annoyed* Becase I don't feel comfortable with it
Cass - *even whinier* Why?
Me - *even more annoyed* Because I don't feel comfortable with it.

Fortunately, Rei stepped in and suggested that Cass (or Lez) should do it, and Cass pouted and whined that I was supposed to do it. She looked on the verge of tears by this point and said that if I wasn't going to do it then she'd just wash the doll off and nobody would get any frosting from it. Rei tried again to defuse the situation, and finally managed, but I swear I was one whine away from asking Cass if she had a problem understanding the concept of "no means no," or if she really thought that continuing to whine would really get me to change my mind.

In times past, I might have just done it, regardless of how I felt about it. I didn't want to make waves, I wanted to please everyone, I didn't want to hurt anyone. But as I'd spent time talking to Rei and Cass about, I'm tired of doing that, pleasing everybody but myself and hating myself for the things I do.

The painful irony behind this is that I also had just finished talking to them both about how so many times in the past, people have given me gifts not that I want, but that they want to give me. A t-shirt from a band my father likes but that I don't, a digital camera I never asked for, and I half expect that my mother's going to give me a birthday present of a gym membership so that I can keep her company when she goes. And I feel terrible about things like that, because I know that intent counts for more than the physical object, but it feels like the intent in those gifts is less than pure anyway. It's not something they think I want, but something they want to give me. And I feel bad for feeling bad about those gifts, because I don't want to hurt anybody.

But both of them encouraged me to stand up for myself and refuse gifts like that. Gifts like my mother taking me to dinner for my birthday and telling me I could eat where I want, and then when I suggested a Chinese restaurant that I'd heard great things about and wanted to try, she refused and said that I should pick somewhere nicer because my birthday dinner should be special. Or another such incident where she refused any restaurant I suggested until I suggested the one she wanted to go to.

And yet when I do that to them...

I don't know. I guess that ultimately, I feel that Cass should have known better in two ways. First, she should have known better than to try whining at me and pulling the pouty face in and attempt to guilt-trip me into doing what she wanted. Secondly, I feel she should have known better than to think I'd do that in the first place. Asexual, fairly modest and reserved, and with body image issues, I'd think that even though it's just a piece of molded plastic, she might have thought ahead and considered that I might not be interested in doing something with such sexual overtones just because she thought it would be funny. (And she meant it to be sexual, I'm certain of it. I'm really starting to think that Cass never got over her high school crush on me...)

So that bothered me. It bothered me because I felt pressured, and it bothered me that it bothered her so much. Rei assures me that it was Cass overreacting to the situation and not me, but some nagging voice at the back of my mind tells me I should have just done it to please Cass.

Birthdays have stopped being fun for me in the last few years. Last year, the only reason my mother did anything with me was because my father guilt-tripped her into it. This year she suggested that we go to the circus (and asked my father if I'd like it before even asking me), and then when I refused because I wasn't that interested, she's barely talking to me since and hasn't mentioned another thing about my birthday. The dinner I was promised 6 years ago by Rei's parents that nobody ever made good on. The present from my parents wrapped in Pikachu wrapping paper that they're sure I'll like because I like anime, and then they wait for the gleeful look on my face that never comes. Then things like this. I'm starting to look forward to my birthday less and less, and actively dread it more and more. It's ceased to be enjoyable and has become more of an ordeal.