Birthdays are a special milestone in our society. It is a
time for us to celebrate our own life as well as for our friends and family to
show, at least verbally, their love for us.
I remember a time in my life when I looked forward to the
day with great anticipation. We look at
the calendar with great worry, fearing that we are caught in a space-time
continuum problem that you can’t solve because you haven’t learned calculus yet
and you are convinced that the universe has slowed downed indefinitely, just to
mess with you as you look expectantly on the coming of your day of birth. That day that you are absolutely positive
will change your life forever because of the promises that the world has
offered you; that day where you are forever beloved, at least for 24 hours; that
day that your parents and family are all looking upon you adoringly, as if the
planets revolved around you; that day where you can do no wrong, in anyone’s
eyes.
You dream longingly about the traditional celebration made
up of a family gathering of friends, food, sweets, games, and never-ending
happiness and celebration and the best payoff of all: the collection of loot,
the gifts from everyone. These gifts will keep you interested probably for weeks,
maybe even months, but they will be relegated to the garage sale pile sometime
within a few years.
Oh, there is the cake aspect as well; we rarely get sick of cake,
which is always a good thing.
We then become more social, we look forward to the birthday
because it is a time to get together with friends, to hang out, to approximate
living life as a person of your age would imagine living life; living those
halcyon days of youth, when the complexities of the world rarely intruded upon
your hothouse like world. But then we become aware of the illicit pleasures of
life. The stuff that the adults would not share with us.
We discover libations, the effects of said libations and of
course the effects of libations on libido. So for a few years the excitement
was to get libations before you are legally allowed to drink libations. That is
what birthdays become, a marker for the day when you can drink legally.
That day comes and the euphoria you were expecting really
doesn’t happen. The infinite flow of Long Island Iced Teas really doesn’t mean
infinite happiness. Far from it, it
means infinite trips to the toilet to infinitely empty your stomach of the
copious amounts which you had assiduously consumed in the immediate hours prior
to the reversal of flow.
But then you get wiser and more mature, relatively; and birthdays
become less important than when you were young. You are responsible now. You
are educated and you put away the childish things for more important
things. There may even be times that you
don’t even celebrate your birthday. Too busy, too important for frivolous
things, you may go grab dinner and drinks with your buddies or a meal with the
family but the days of the all-day bashes are gone. The caches of loot have all
disappeared as well. Other than maybe weird Aunt Helen with the goofy sweaters
that are two sizes too small. She always got your age mixed up anyways.
Until now. Today. When the ubiquity of social media and
technology leashes are everywhere.
Holidays and birthdays are the days when people who aren’t
usually on your feed will reach out and send you a note: “Yo, HBD.” Or some
kind of a variation on the theme.
Texts come incessantly, your Facebook timeline is blowing up
with simple single sentences, yet with each glance of the message a history
unfolds in your mind. The good times and
bad that you had with this person, you ponder your relationship. How close you
once were or were not. How you came to know this person. Occasionally, there is
the: “Who the F--- IS this person?” response, and then you think back, hard.
The glimmer of a memory comes to you and you begin to recreate the time, the
place, the situation, the smell, the light, the colors, and the memory once
again becomes vivid.
The massive amount of messages stops you dead on your track
for the day, your memories are filled with mini-reminiscences and tangents from
that specific person and that specific time to sometime closer to it but not
quite the same instance. You go on that long nostalgic ride into the past, into
the deep recesses of your mind, the parts that have not been impaired by that
long ago experiment with alcohol or other substances of recreation, that part
of your memory that you hope and wish will never go away but you know will
inevitably be robbed from you just because that’s life.
But you have the now, the flood of your memories and they are
alive with images of the past that seem as fresh as daisies, as immediate as
now, and as sharp as a ginsu knife.
This was a day that you live through as if in an extended
but much better version of Groundhogs Day, because you want to relive the
memories, and you know you have a much better ending in mind, an ending that is
better than having Bill Murray nd Andie McDowell in it. You want this day to
never end because you are actually replaying your life with all these people
all over again; in slowmotion, in technicolor, is The Matrix slow motion, and
it is epic, and it is better than it actually was, and you memories begin to
play tricks on you because you are blanketed by the warm thought that all these
people cared enough to reach out to you on this one day just to make you feel
special. That little kid living inside of you, that insecure one, is asking: do I actually
deserve all of this attention?
And you end up saying: abso-fucking-lutely.
Yeah, that was my day. I want to do it again. Tomorrow, and the next day.
