Well, for some people birthdays really suck. It doesn’t sound like you are one of them, since you’ve been able to organize parties for yourself. There’s nothing I would like better than to be able to completely not notice my birthday until it was months in the past.
The thing is, I believe that birthdays are really for the parents. Like, wow, we finally got that one out of the oven. That’s something to remember, and indeed, on my children’s birthdays, I always think back to those delivery rooms and remember what my wife went through.
As for us—a free day just because we got born? We had nothing to do with that. We have no responsibility for existing, so why should we celebrate it? I guess it’s kind of like winning the lottery, but if that happened to me, you can be sure I would keep it as private as possible.
I have a friend who loves having attention on his birthday. We’ll stand in a circle around him singing happy birthday and he’ll turn and turn with his arms held wide, as if he was soaking in the invisible manna. Friend. Well, we hang out with the same crowd, but I don’t really like him. He’s a salesman. Kind of hard to tell what’s real with him. Sort of the male version of perkiness. Hey, guess what? His wife is perkier than Maxwell House, and she annoys the shit out of me. She’s got to learn to put a sock in it.
I don’t know. Maybe it’s a self-esteem thing. You like the attention or you don’t. You think you deserve it or you don’t. I prefer parties that have nothing to do with anything other than let’s have a party. I don’t even tell anyone when my birthday is. Sometimes I won’t even say what sign I am. I say that I was born on Mars on the day it goes backwards in its orbit, and we don’t have signs there.
Wanna know something weird? Well, I’ll tell you anyway. It turns out that Mars really did go retrograde on my birthday that year. Just what you’ve always wondered. Wundy is a Martian. An alien. No wonder he never knows which fork to use. You heard it here first!