Birthday Bedlam

As I guessed early Friday, the impact of my birthday festivities that night left me rather incapacitated for the duration of the following day. I have heard how it pays off to mix in glasses of water with all the alcohol one drinks in the course of an evening, but that is a lesson that I have yet to learn. I was advised after the fact by a friend that on one's birthday, such precautions are not to be taken in any case. I was glad to be vindicated.

Dinner was good. It followed a fit of anxiety as the burden of logistical planning began to overwhelm me, and I feel that every birthday ought to contain both a freak-out and friends good enough to help you through it. Dinner was pushed back, but things otherwise proceeded apace. The restaurant, which as I think I said yesterday excels at bacon and which I first visited a few years ago for the party of a friend, was good.

Too Much Birthday

I was at a wedding the other day, and while there is plenty that I might write about, the first thing that occurs to me is something rather incidental that happened during the proceedings. At the hotel my parents opted for, there was a rather expansive lobby. It had a bar and a lot of space riddled with furniture. It was really a fairly nice place, although I can't imagine seeking to linger in any hotel lobby personally.

The first time I went in there, there was a party going on. In fact, signage informed us that it was some girl's seventeenth birthday, and it strikes me that it was a rather extravagant set-up for such a party. I know of course that many affluent families are prone to spending heavily to make their progeny happy (or is it to make their own young selves happier after the fact?) I just never really saw too much of that stuff myself.

My Day Of Days

Yesterday I wrote about my impending birthday and the feelings I had and typically have leading up to that. Generally it's negative feelings that I have to keep at bay, and the only way to do it is to be with friends and to stay busy. The fact that I have such a hard time getting it together makes that a very uncertain proposition. As I write this though, I can confirm that the occasion was about as pleasant as it is possible for it to be.

The day of course started without a plan. I had vaguely gotten the idea of going out for dinner to a fairly popular Mexican restaurant where I could eat for free and which my friends generally like well. That started to gain momentum, and I further thought that something else ought to be added at a bare minimum, and I figured that the thing to do would be to add a trip to a bar. Well, there's only a couple I like going to, so I picked one.

Doomed By The Bell

It's my birthday today, and since I'm writing this in advance, I can only hope that I'm in a pleasant mood. My fear is that I may be rather melancholy, however little cause I may have for that. In spite of being fairly young still, I do not relish the occasion of my birthday, and. The last time I enjoyed my birthday fully and without reservation, I believe I was in college. Since then, each one has been worse than the last.

That's not to say that each one of those days has been horrible. I have enjoyed some in spite of their significance. What makes the thing palatable is having one's friends and loved ones around. That has the effect of distracting me and pacifying me for the duration of the day. Each day after my birthday sees some of the trauma wear away, and before I know it I have gotten used to being the age that I have just become.

No More

The Halloween holiday season is, as I have made clear enough over the last week or so, a time of anxiety over having to come up with costumes. That alone is hard enough, let alone all the other times when some people are inclined to come up with a costume and a reason to wear it. It used to be, I think that they had to keep such things to themselves once. I do believe in people getting to live out their lives in the manner that they choose so long as it affects no one else adversely, but there's a limit.

Anyway, what I'm getting at is that there was a party the other day where people were asked to dress in costume as a tribute to the birthday boy. I certainly can respect that, as I would myself be honored if anyone decided to do that for me. It hasn't happened yet, but it easily could one day. It's regrettable though that this birthday should fall just when I am in the throes of costume-concocting and wearing fatigue.

Blast!

You do crazy things for people you care about. It's invariably birthdays for which I do things that I have no desire to do or which I haven't done in a very long time. It wasn't so long ago that I found myself playing mini-golf again for the first time since achieving puberty, and playing games in an arcade for the first time in nearly as long. These were for birthdays, one of which also entailed the birth of a baby, I think.

Well, a more recent birthday had me doing something that held little appeal for me. As I say though, you do these things when you care about someone. A good friend was having a birthday, as seems to happen all too often, and it was his wish that we play laser tag. I would rather have been to the sushi restaurant that preceded this event, but as it worked out I couldn't make it. I ate at home and made my way to the laser tag venue.

Happy

Fast approaching is my birthday. When I was a boy, I couldn't wait for my birthday to come. In those days, certain things were assured. There was a big party with everyone from my class. They really had to come, and it's debatable just how many would have of their own volition, or how many would have bought me a present with their own money. As it was, their parents provided the money and they piled up for me a bounty of action figures. Birthdays were a good thing then.

I don't happen to anticipate them with much eagerness anymore. I trace this trend back to college and its conclusion. Birthdays were fine even as I was still attending classes, but the moment I graduated, each one after that became more unpleasant. I think that there ceased to be anything to gain from getting older, and all there was to experience was the steady march to the end of the trail, as it were. Being still very young, that was an immensely unappetizing prospect.

Celebrity Birthdays

A staple of the newspaper entertainment section is the listing of entertainment industry notables whose birthday it is. They run them in TV entertainment news shows as well. It's a curious thing to me that anyone should be interested. I try to fight the impulse to look and become invested, and while I have sometimes limited success, you can rest assured that I consider there to be very good reasons for eschewing this odious bit of genuinely useless information.

Probably the only necessary reason is that I don't know these people. If it's Adrian Zmed's birthday, I'm not going to call him with well wishes, send him a card or buy him a gift, because he's not a friend or relation. The nature of entertainment and public relations is that there is a deliberately cultivated false relationship between star and consumer which starts the latter to thinking that something like the star's birthday has some significance. It's all I can do to keep up with the birthdays of people I do know, so that's what I'm going to focus on.

Dia De Natal

I had my birthday recently. It was not something I was looking forward to. I stopped enjoying birthdays once I finished college. I don't know exactly what about that triggered a change in my attitude, but it would seem that exiting academia and entering the 'real world' led to a greater appreciation for aging and my mortality. Some time ago, my anxiety stemming from the matter came to the fore during what remains one of the best improv scenes I've had. A man is worried about losing his significant other on account of his aging, but she allays his fears in the aftermath of his latest birthday party. It was a musical scene, and the song was 'Happy Birthday To Our Love'.

The party is the only thing that makes the occasion tolerable. This year, I was feeling a bit down as I had not planned a party for myself. Every birthday party of mine had either been planned by myself or my parents, who had not done so since some time during grade school. This time around, I kept thinking of putting together a party, getting stuck on logistics and postponing it. The same thing happened last year, but I finally slapped something together at the last minute and felt grateful that nearly everyone came. It was fun, although looking at pictures from that night I can't see any evidence of it on my face.