Because we all need some comic relief in these tough times...

When headlines like this are plaguing all news outlets, there needs to be some humor to get ourselves through the day. Because if there isn't, we'll all wind up plugging up our ears with our fingers and shoving our heads under our pillows. And what good would that do?

So, I present you with some eerie, yet silly, photos of my younger brother, Anthony, that I took while experimenting with my new camera.

Gasp! A ghost?

Anthony, in normal form.

Birthday Blues

So much pressure sits on the expectation of a birthday. For some reason, it's embedded into our brains that our birthday is the one day where everything must go right. It's this expectation that makes birthdays as high maintenance and stressful as they are.

For instance, Monday was my birthday. Monday is my deadline day so it's the craziest day of the week. It's usually hectic but bearable...but not on my birthday.

There's about a foot snow on the ground and I wore the wrong shoes (as always) and my feet were soaked the entire day. Usually, not much to whine about but it is on my birthday.

Every year, I find myself feeling more anxiety than pleasure as the calendar inches it's way to my birth date...but maybe that's linked to the whole getting older thing.

The whole ideal that a birthday is a special day for nothing to go wrong makes it a hard thing for anyone to live up too. Little mishaps are seen as devastating and they happen everyday.

For now, I'll look forward to nothing more than a strawberry cake with my name on it.