Birthdays and other painful celebrations

So I had another birthday on the first of this month. Not that it's anything significant or spectacular, or even a birthday worth looking forward too, but it came, I had it, and it's gone.

I'm pretty sure that this is the "adult" patterns for birthdays. They're non-events now. If anything, they're a reminder that yes, dammit, it's still illegal for you to sleep with a highschooler.

Remember when we were all kids and birthdays were something to look forward to? We'd count down the days, come up with a birthday list and even drop subtle clues when telling others our age. "I'm seven and a half," we'd say, hoping that in six months they remember and shower us with cake and adoration. When did all of this cease to be a part of the birthday regimen? I certainly don't walk around telling people that I'm twenty three and a half any longer, and I haven't made a list in years.

What's worse is, we get shitty gifts now and think that they're good. Remember what happened when you got a new shirt for your birthday as a kid? That fucking sucked hard. You get all excited for the new supersoaker 7000 and you end up with a shitty shirt that you'll have to wear to school, another place that fun dies. Now, whenever we get a gift like a shirt or a new pair of pants we get psyched! "Sweet!" we think, "now I can match when I wear my brown belt and my new khakis." Someone should shoot me in the head for thinking that. Ever. I HAVE thought it before, and if you're over the age of 18 so have you. I say we dial back the maturity a little bit and demand that we only get plastic electronic toys that have more buttons and sirens than we know what to do with and will drive our parents/roommates insane. I would have shot my own mother for a chance to have one of those electronic noise-making key chains. The ones that made the sound of a bomb falling, a car crashing, and if there was a God in the sky that loved you, sometimes a fart. Hell I'd still probably shoot my mom for a fart machine, and that's the way it should be.

Birthdays should be more about what you want, not what you need. A free pass on that loan from your parents isn't a good birthday gift. A dozen snap bracelets with dayglo green stars is. Candles that make your room smell less like beer and man-stink and more like babies and springtime is not a good birthday gift. A waterballoon launcher and a bag of tennis balls is. A nice decorative rug to match your new comforter is a horrible fucking birthday gift. A new model rocket that takes size DDD engines and needs to have FAA clearance is a mother-shooting good birthday gift.

The only tradition that seems to have held itself over from childhood to now is that of surrounding yourself with your closest friends and ingesting things until you're sick. Then you go swimming. When you're younger you were hogging down cup cakes, or if your parents actually loved you, an ice cream cake. Then you went swimming. Now at birthdays you're all sucking down as much alcohol as humanly possible before deciding to throw the birthday celebrant into the nearest body of water. Or standing him up in the shower and trying to get him to sober up because he just picked a fight with a houseplant. ("Quit touching my ear, you queer sonofabitch!") Not exactly like the voluntary leap into the pool that you took when you were little but the evidence says it's close enough. In both cases you had too much of something, are soaking wet and have a high probability of throwing up all over everything. That's enough for me.