Birthdays

This Friday will be my 46^th birthday.   Happy Birthday to me!   Remarkably, I’ve yet to comment on birthdays in my blog.  So here goes.

Naturally as children, we celebrate birthdays more aggressively, with much more pomp and circumstance.  My father used to set up a movie projector and rent films – in those big flat metal cans – and we’d enjoy Paul Bunyan, the Red Balloon, Sinbad, and other exciting films.  Later, living in Paris, birthdays would typically be celebrated by going out, en masse, to the Champs Elysees to watch American films in “version original” (“V.O.”), i.e. in English with French subtitles.  French movies had a long “séance” (summoning of commercial spirits, hopefully naked women) before the previews and then the film itself.  French movie theaters also liked to exit directly off onto the street, which was disorienting if the movie ended in daylight hours.

My most recent “party” was in January 2000, when we gathered at Dave & Buster’s at White Flint Mall, mostly playing video games while the Vikings lost to the Rams.  Later that month the Rams beat the Titans in the Super Bowl – and it snowed big time here.  I'd given myself a present: traded a 1990 Fender Stratocaster, '62 Vintage Reissue, for a more modern "Fat Strat" with a humbucker in the bridge position and a 70's headstock...which I still have.  

As we grow older, too many people cast aside birthdays as things to be noticed, let alone celebrated.   They claim it’s because it’s a reminder they’re getting older.  Well, of course.  But my argument is the opposite: precisely because we’re getting older, that’s all the more reason to celebrate surviving another year.   “I plan on living forever: so far, so good.”

I’d suggest we simply find more grown up ways of celebrating, which doesn’t take too much brainpower.  No more clowns, magicians, or kiddie things.  Go to Hooters or Tilted Kilt.  Go to a nice restaurant.   But above all, celebrate continued life – celebrate that it’s a birthday and not a funeral.  Please.

Cake.  I’m actually not a big fan of cake (“pass it on, Milton” “But..but…!”).  I like chocolate cake with chocolate icing, or red velvet – ideally as a layer cake, not a flat cake.  Ice cream cakes I can’t stand.  Nor do I like carrot cake, or “gallette” (that horrible cake in France – trying to find the king somewhere inside).  Simple is best.  Easier to low out a 4 and a 6 candle than 46 individual candles.