Steps to enjoying your birthday:

1) A good lead-in

It helps to have something incidental happen a couple of days before. Be it bad, good, or standard eventful (“Oh look, now all stamps come self-adhesive!”). No, you don’t have to sandwich your birthday between the last day at a very very hated job, a music festival, and the first day of a very lovely job. It couldn’t hurt to schedule to birth of a baby (even your firstborn, like my mother did) for the day before your birthday. Even a bad day the day before is a good lead-in because really, how can your day be worse?*

2) Hype-free

Birthdays are like New Year’s this way. Sit back and let them happen and they will probably take care of themselves. Par example,

“Three friends didn’t RSVP and two showed up after I didn’t get a cake big enough and my cute outfit got shrunk in the wash and they ran out of the vodka I like and and and . . .”

vs.

“Yeah it was great. We ended up going to a couple of places and saw a few people. Great times.”

3) Accept the tokens.

I come from a place where birthdays matter. So when creepy comb-over guy hands you a walnut from his weird bag of no-name dry mix nuts and mumbles, “many combolations birthday-Gert,” say thanks and invite him to your party anyway. Who doesn’t want Senor Cardgage hanging around?

4) Kind of try to appreciate your family.

This isn’t hard for me at all, the Balabans being a band of superhuman masters** who treat every birthday like something that matters and leave nice messages on your answering machine. But whatever it is that your family does for birthdays (if anything, I hope), appreciate it, enjoy it. They’re celebrating your birth. They made you.


I’ve said before that one year is a nice block of time upon which to reflect (or to express-reflect, comparing the events of today with the events of this date exactly one year ago). So, one year ago I was in a job I kinda liked in a good part of town, feeling good about things and looking forward. And this year it's the same thing all over again. Only now I know how to make mushroom lasagna.

Notes:

* how can your day be worse?: Okay, disregarding that year when it rained all day and I had like 30 essays to write and I had to spend the afternoon looking at vacation photos. That night I took muscle relaxers before my friends took me out so that I had an excuse to go home. That year was bad. Down with 20!

**a band of superhuman masters: I’ve been thinking about this a lot during the last five minutes. What if my entire family and extended family really were a band (musical genre TBA) or superhuman masters? And the out-of-town people were superhuman monsters? How kickass would that be! Better than Pesach! Better than people keep telling me synagogue is when I’m not there! Better than an all-Journey mix tape in which the first song on each side is "Lovin' Touchin' Squeezin'"!