Geburtstag! - Happy Birthday!

With each passing year my cynicism for celebrating the day you happened to pop out of your mum’s lady parts gets ever stronger. At home, surrounded by family, it’s impossible to let the occasion pass undetected. Chances are you’ll get a cake complete with candles and a woefully out-of-tune rendition of that Michael Jackson song - possibly followed by Happy Birthday. Of course as a kid this is brilliant. Blowing out candles and shovelling icing-covered buns and chocolate roll in your face while you get a ton of extra toys for simply existing is the tits. But after the age of about ten, the cake and all that is just the mandatory parent-humouring procedure you have to follow in order to collect your increasingly expensive and hand-picked presents guilt-free. This goes on till you leave home and suddenly start to realise the value of money. You think back all those years where your mum spent a ludicrous proportion of her meagre wage to buy you a Sega Megadrive, and yet you still had the temerity to turn around and ask where all the other games were. But personal stories of shame and remorse aside, I get that for adults birthdays can make you feel special. The big day, in addition to Christmas, Easter, and several bank holidays, is another break from the humdrum monotony of working life. But it’s extra special because it’s all about YOU. People will be extra nice and maybe even offer up a selection of side-splittingly ironic gifts (that aren’t, despite their spirited claims, actually ironic at all) but you have to just smile and give enthusiastic thanks for that life-sized inflatable sheep or latex replica of a porn star‘s love grotto.
No, I sound like an ungrateful bastard. It really is nice to be thought about, and I’m sure people do have the best intentions when it comes to birthday gift-buying, but for all that nicety and good will to be exhibited on one single day, just to dissipate the next is probably more depressing than uplifting. I don’t make a big deal of my birthday because I don’t see the big deal. I’m not going to organise a big night out, inviting anyone and everyone to stroke and massage my ego like it‘s a goat in a Yarmouth petting zoo. What’s the point? I’m quite secure in my own insecurities, so can live without a parade of well-wishers having fun while I just sit there wondering who actually really gives a shit. Apologies for conjuring such a bleak image, but this week was supposed to be the most downbeat of the year, so I’ve got an excuse. And an entire coconut sponge cake to comfort-eat my way through. But alas, my Sega Megadrive broke and is long since gone. As is any time, desire or skill to finish this drivel in any decent or funny way. Boohoo to me.