Birthday Blooze?

So my promise of more regular postings didn't really yield much fruit. In fact, it didn't really yield any fruit. It was fruitless.

Yesterday was my 26th birthday. For the last couple of years (three when I come to think of it), I have had very little motivation to actually celebrate my birthday, least of all in the traditional manner society dictates to be appropriate (special dinner, big night out, private party etc.). Do I really want to oblige people to celebrate my existence? Are their lives intolerable in a parallel universe in which I don't exist? Excessive self-pity aside, playing a birthday down is the best way to avoid the almost inevitable disppointment of being let down. If you apply this kind of attitude on a more general level, you might come to the conclusion that it is really best never to expect anything from anyone - perhaps then you can only be pleasantly surprised?

Well, this year proved to be one of my least celebrated birthdays to date. I didn't tell anyone from work. For one thing, to tell them would carry an additional tacit expectation on my part that they would club together and buy me some kind of rudimentary gift. I would then, if only for a split second, subconsciously judge the gift as a measure of my value in that particular social sphere - its estimated price gauging my popularity, its non-materialisation an outright declaration of my worthlessness. Have I really stooped to these levels of shallowness and insecurity? Well, no, not exactly. I'm much closer to apathy, and the truth is that I would far sooner avoid the entire siutation. I don't need gifts and good wishes from work colleagues - their only substantial effect on my life would be (im)material. On the other hand, maybe I regret not telling one particular colleague, as he's perhaps more worthy of the friend title than that of colleague, and as such deserves the remission of my latest façade. I may well point him in the direction of this blog when we finish working together and the regularity of our contact decreases substantially. A note to you: you know who you are - if you ever read this, this constitutes an apology...

The tacit expectation of a gift applies far less when it comes to close friends, at least for me and my circle of chums, who happen to be mostly male (ever since my ex-girlfriend accused me of being sexist in an overly-drawn-out break-up speech via several hundred miles of telelphone wire, I have a tendency to consciously avoid making gender generalisations). Amongst close friends, the acknowledgement is far more important than the form. I suspect that this is because acknowledgement carries with it a confirmation of their respect and their consideration, without which a close friendship soon becomes an acquaintance. Anything else is of course welcome, but in no way defining.

So, returning to my original point, namely that playing a birthday down is the best way to avoid the almost inevitable disppointment of being let down, you might be tempted to ask exactly what this awful disappointment is that I am trying to avoid, potentially at the cost of F.U.N. I've worded that carefully though: what I have called inevitable disappointment does not necessarily constitute a reason to play down your birthday, rather if you're at a point where you feel that you would be disappointed with anything less than your expectations of the event, should you choose to have one, being met, then it is not necessarily negative not to have one despite society's decree to the contrary. By giving autonomy to people, setting your expectations lower and celebrating more intimately and discreetly, I would say that you can find far more out about the nature of your relationships.

Most of my closest friends, where possible, made their own efforts to spend time with me around my birthday, which were appreciated and filed accordingly in my mind. Most also communicated their good wishes, which is important for reasons I discussed earlier. My family sent heart-felt words in their cards (none of them are in London), which I found surprisingly touching. Acquaintances and other friends had little if any involvement. My personal celebration amounted to a night out with my flatmate to someone else's birthday party, where we knew very few people and drank heavily (but not to the point of the kind of student depravity I'm trying to avoid). My actual birthday was a fragile Sunday in my dressing gown.

Perfect in its imperfection.