This is the birthday song; it is not very long.

I've been so shitty on the upkeep around here. I had to work long hours last week and this weekend on a commercial, casting child actors and discussing logistics with pot-bellied pig trainers who fax me pictures of small piglets wearing dresses, lifting one leg in the air or carrying batons in their mouths. ("She's even been on Letterman!") Both the child actors and the piggies elicit a similar response of adoration/guilt for exploiting the helpless. Parents of child actors and piggie trainers are suspiciously similar in behavior. Nellie and Hammy (those are the pigs) will get stubborn if they work more than eight hours. I'm worried most of the children at the audition were actually fat-cheeked robots like Haley Joel Osmond in A.I. which I'm starting to think was really a much better movie than I originally thought, given its value as an expose into the murky underworld of child actor robotics. Probably spelled wrong. Harry Joel Oswald? I get confused with Haley Mills and the Osmonds and Lee Harvey Oswald. I prefer not to discuss it. It's a wicked world.

Also it seems like everybody's birthdays are all at once. So: Martin, Elana and Louis: I got good and drunky at your parties with their cupcakes and sleeping pills and high-heel hazardous balconies. I weep profusely with love for you all. Ted and Nathalie: I'd like to teach the world to sing with you. Rebecca: We're not having a "quiet dinner with close friends."