It’s my birthday. I celebrated first thing by calling my mother and wishing myself a happy birthday from her. Since early November she’s been regularly apologising for forgetting my birthday but the irony is of course that there was no mention of it from her today. Who says Alzheimer’s isn’t funny.
I’ve never really been terribly excited by my birthday. It comes too soon after Christmas and any special plans usually get swept into new year’s eve the following night. Plus if you think about it, a birthday is celebrating the day of your birth. As an adoptee, that’s the day a woman held me in her arms and went ‘no, I don’t think so’. I like terming myself ‘adoptee’, it’s my second favourite title after Corporate Communications Director. Back when I was big in PR.
Talking with my friend Amanda earlier, I came up with the idea of skipping any birthdays you don’t like and waiting till you get to a more preferable number. The more I think about it, the more I realise what a genius idea this is. 43 is a very boring age, it has a horrible middle-agedness feel to it. The traditional British Bingo call for 43 is ‘down on your knees’, a position I find quite uncomfortable. (you can check your rhyming bingo call here) Plus it’s an odd number which is a bad omen and probably accounts for why half of my 43 years have been a bit shit.
I’ve quite enjoyed being 42, it’s closer to 40 and has a certain authority to it. And I don’t think I’ll mind being 44 in a year’s time as 44 has a nice symmetry and if you reverse the numbers it’s still the same, so you can’t lament the years far behind you. So for now I’m sticking at 42 and trying not to think too much about being 24 and those halcyon days of living off toast and bovril and scraping together another 50 pence for the electricity meter.
I would also like to remind the me that’s reading this again a year from now that she should be very grateful for such creative birthday accounting. And I hope she didn’t mess things up too much in 2009.
Gift of the day goes to Erik for this Dog A Day creation in honour of my birthday. We referenced each other in our blogs, aren’t we lovely.