It's Inky's birthday and she's all grown up now.

Happy birthday Tina!

Love,

Mom

Holy Cow! Jesus H. Christ! I mean, like Wow! Holy Wow!

Oh, yes, Happy Birthday!

--Brant

Happy Birthday Tina! All the best! Chris

Damn, you is all growed up fa sho! Happy Birthday, Inkmeister! Don't do anything I wouldn't do.

(I'd put all kinds of smilies and cool shit, but they don't work...at my work).

Happy Birthday.

Wow, Tina looks great!

Happy 18th Birthday! Buy yourself a bottle of French champagne, you deserve it!

Happy birthday, Inky! Eighteen is a wonderful age.

I'm going to give you some unsolicited advice, which you are of course free to ignore. I certainly would have, at your age. It's this: Try to remember, with your head if you can't with your heart, that the negative emotions that are not uncommon in one's late teens do not, I repeat, do not last. It only seems as if they will. But broken hearts do mend, hopeless parents do learn, failures do not make brilliant successes impossible. And the joys of life keep returning, year after year and time after time, to be savored and charished.

May you have many joys to cherish.

Barbara

That is wonderful advice, Barbara. God knows I myself could have used it.

"ZOMG, Angst!"



Oh, and here are some smilies now, since I could not post them earlier:

Tina,

It occurred to me that I did not post anything.

Sorry. Look what your mother has to put up with.



You are now officially a young woman. May happiness be legion in your life.

Love,

Michael

Thanks everyone! Sorry I couldn't reply earlier, but I appreciate all the well-wishing and advice. Yep, I gotta be a grown-up now, how 'bout that.

Tina:

~ UGOGIRL! er, UGOWOMAN! (hmmm...doesn't have the same ring; sorry)

~ Congrats...on making it this many times around the sun...and still having a good 'sense of life.' Your mom probably has something to do with that.

~ Barbara's advice is worth keeping in your mind...so that your heart can refer to it when needed; and, it WILL, sometime, be needed to be remembered.

LLAP
J:D

Happy Birthday!!!!

A great idea, except for one small problem. The legal drinking age in the US is 21 in every state, due to an act of extortion by the US government in which it threatened to cut off all highway funds to any state that didn't raise its drinking age to 21. So an individual becomes a legal adult at 18 in every respect but one.

So, Tina, get yourself a nice bottle of French champagne (or California sparkling wine) any way you can. If it involves a technical violation of the law, all the better. There are lots of fun crimes involving violations of stupid laws.

Happy birthday!

Martin

In France adolescents drink wine with supper. When I was about four or five my Mother was drinking beer from a steel can while we were having a build-the-school thing here in Tucson. She was the founding influence of the Tucson Community School--still going strong. She wanted a decent pre-school for me so I would get "socialized." I kept after her to give me a taste. Finally she did. It was awful! I suppose today I'd get thrown into a foster home and my Mom into jail!

--Brant