It was my birthday, and I'll whine if I want to

While I enjoy holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas (mostly for the food), they aren’t the most important holidays to me. The important holiday, the one that matters, is my birthday. This is when fireworks spelling my name should be let off in the sky, when the school intercom wishes me happy birthday so that the whole student body knows (which has happened), when the banks and post office shut down in my honor (so that’s really for President’s Day, but whatever). And, since I'm not dating anyone-and don't- I don't have to worry about that pesky Valentine's Day getting in the way. The 16th of February, and the days around it, are all about me.

I hear other people comment that, as they get older, they just don’t care as much about their birthday. I do. But I have started to wonder if this birthday laissez-faire is inevitable.

This year for my birthday: I got sick and had to cancel plans for the Friday beforehand,  I found out that I was not getting into a Ph.D. program (for the second time), someone else took my dream trip for MY birthday, and my birthday plans for the weekend were altered without consulting me first or letting me know beforehand, though it turned out okay. And then there was my actual birthday.

Perhaps I am spoiled. My 30^th birthday, for example, turned out to be a full week of celebrations. Each day that week something was going on (dinner, etc.) and it was all focused on my birthday. It helped that I worked an evening shift with people who then hung out at a local bar a couple of blocks down after work. My birthday provided an excellent excuse to go out. I seem to remember on my actual birthday that year not getting home until 6 or so in the morning, though I might be mixing that up with other nights (a couple of really memorable New Year’s Eves, a date where we ended up walking in downtown Disney earning strange looks from staff who were trying to set everything up at dawn, a night around that time where a bunch of us crashed at a coworker’s house, etc.).

This may sound as if I am a huge partier. I wasn’t really a big drinker then (after one company holiday party at a downtown bar I watched a coworker being carried to the back seat of a car so someone could drive her home and thought to myself, “thank goodness I’ve never gotten even close to that stage,”) and I’m even less of one now. And I’ve noticed over the last few years that my birthday has become a bit calmer, and I’m okay with that. Mostly.

So I’ve worked for companies where the employees make a big deal of people’s birthdays. Even at the call center (oy!), when budget cuts limited some perks, managers would at least find a way to bring cupcakes or cake each month so that birthdays for the month were acknowledged. Everyone would say happy birthday to each other on the actual day (then again, we had to find some kind of enjoyment at that job). At my current place of unpaid employment, my birthday had been on the schedule for at least a month beforehand. When I got to “work” Monday morning, after the third or fourth person said something to me without a happy birthday attached, I started to wonder if it was a joke. I even tweeted that I felt like Molly Ringwald’s character in 16 Candles. Eventually I broke down and asked someone who had just told me my appointment had arrived if she had anything else to say to me (much like Molly Ringwald says to her mother on her birthday morning). “Like what?” she asked. Later on she asked when I was heading home, and I realized that they probably needed time to have people sign a birthday card still. When I was heating up leftovers from my weekend birthday dinner, someone else came out of their office, looked at me and asked if I was all right (maybe something of my previous week was showing on my face?) and then went back into their office, all without saying those magical two words: happy birthday.

 

Perhaps if a bunch of other stuff didn't seem to be going wrong at the same time, this may not have even bothered me. It also might be time for me to realize that the world doesn't revolve around me, even if it's for just one day. It may be time for me to lower my expectations.

 

So, evidently, no birthday fireworks will be set off. Maybe birthdays are for young people. Maybe it isn't actually all about me. Maybe the magic is really gone.

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P.S. Someone remembered to ask today how my birthday went- and I just happened to follow (right behind) two male firefighters back to their parked fire engine by the campus shuttles. And I did get the new Sleater-Kinney deluxe LP. So it's not so bad.