Today's Review: Birthdays

Today it's my birthday. I'm 24. How depressing. I can't even pretend I'm young anymore. I'm like, in my mid 20s. Birthdays are great when you're a kid, you get crap loads of presents, parties, cakes, all that jazz. The enjoyment gets less as you get older, but that's probably because everyone's too busy stressing about how they're closer to death to go out and do anything about it.

There is a certain mathematical formula in place for calculating a person's enjoyment of Christmas, mostly involving the ratio of money spent versus value of presents received. This is inevitably going to get higher as you get older, so it is easy to understand why old people don't like Christmas until they're really old and can just spend the day trolling everyone with nasty comments that can be passed off as a "funny turn". Birthdays shouldn't be like that though. The day is all about you. More people enjoy their birthdays than Christmas, but a chunk of it is portrayed as "Ha ha, you're gonna die even sooner".

Truth is, we're always getting closer to dying. As They Might Be Giants said, "You're older than you've ever been and now you're even older, and now you're older still". We don't need a specific day of the year in order to celebrate our advancement in age, it's happening constantly. If anything, we should be depressed every day. You might be slowly dying, but you also might step in front of a bus, so just deal with it. Enjoy every day, especially your birthday. Milk it for all it's worth. If anyone asks you to do something, just say "But it's my birthday!" until it becomes a reasonable excuse for everything. Ask for something you kinda wanted to buy but didn't want to waste your own money on. Presents are free money, we feel less guilt owning something that turns out to be crap if someone else bought it.

My birthday hasn't gone quite according to plan. My mother became ill, so we have no babysitter, Pizza Hut had no 50% off voucher. But I'm rolling with the punches. Amelia got sent home from nursery 'cause she was sick, but that meant I got to spend more time with her, so it's all good. And soon I'm going to go out and get drunk, which I only really do on my birthday. Tomorrow's review will probably be about the state of my head.

My rating: 5/5