you know why today's date is significant?

because today is 12/12. which is far cooler than 11/11. and 12+12 is 24. and there are 24 hours in a day. and 24 is the best show on tv. and dave brenner was number 24 when he used to play hockey.

i mean. how cool is that?

okay. sigh. despite my best efforts otherwise, today is …

monday.

and even more tragically, today's is my birthday. my 24th "birfday."

and i hate my birthday.

fair enough, i don't hate the day of my birthday so much as i hate the day afterwards. for me, there is nothing worse than feeling just-special-enough one day to feel just-less-than-average-enough the next. and i think i'd rather just not make a big deal out of my birthday than have to deal with the only-364-more-days-until-other-people-make-me-feel-
like-i'm-special-again-post-birthday-depression.

back in september (http://debbierosenbaum.com/2005/09/1212-liquor-bar-blues.html), i wrote a little bit about this phenomenon.

"i have not really liked my birthday since after the days when other moms used to bring in supermarket cupcakes for our preschool classes. but even then, this overachiever was never satisfied with offering my peers the option of 'vanilla cupcake or chocolate cupcake?'

the night before my birthday, my mom and i would always make something that i was sure no one else would ever bring in: toll house cookie pie, ice cream cone swirl cupcakes with homemade cream cheese frosting, double chocolate chip peanut butter walnut bars. and i think one year i convinced her to make both gourmet applecake and martha stewart rice krispy treats.

like i said. i've always been an overachiever. and competitive - more competitive than you.

(by the way, i'm convinced that my adolescent and adult obsession with simple box yellow cake sans icing is a direct result of my childhood dessert snobbishness.)

but anyway.

around the year i turned 6 and every year forward, my parents would offer to 'buy me off,' a proposition any future business school student would agree to: instead of spending the money to throw a party for some snot-nosed kids in my class, my parents would give me the money to buy whatever i could budget. you think i had friends because i was a nice kid or because i had the coolest toys?"

so. i made the martha stewart rice krispy treat confetti bars for my office today. just because i'm not 6 years-old and just because i don't really like my birthday doesn't mean that i'm not going to do something completely infantile for the hell of it.

because what 24 really boils down to is one thing: i'm no longer approaching my quarterlife crisis; rather, i'm in the throws of it.

(which for me, ultimately translates into: crap. does that mean i'm only going to live until i'm 96? now that's crisis.)

i'm not sure when the birthday hatred began, but i think it had something to do with the great gatsby.

hear me out. when we were reading the book in seventh grade (well, maybe just some of us were reading it; the rest of the class had the cliffs notes), the narrator suddenly announces "i just realized that today is my … birthday."

i distinctly remember how profoundly struck i was. who the hell suddenly realizes that today is his or her birthday? (i mean, if eric were his boyfriend, he would have also woken up to someone singing "happy birthday.") mr. wermus tried to explain that this point in the book is a turning point for nick, the narrator, and this statement is an indication of his resolve to no longer drift through life.

from that day forward, i think i resolved to one day "suddenly realize" that today is my birthday too. because in the throws of my quarterlife crisis, i would kill to just drift through life.

which beats what i'm doing: drowning.

admittedly, there is one part of my birthday that i kind of like: the phone calls and IMs. i mean, if birthdays are good for one thing, then they're a good excuse to hear from people we only speak to occasionally. and as far as i'm concerned, i don't really care what reason you have for giving me a 'holla. as long as you do. but only every once in a while.

and for me personally, there's also a deeper aspect to my birthday (gag; don't tell anyone about this). it's the one day a year when i figuratively measure myself and never literally weigh myself. how far have i come in the last year? what have i achieved?

and most importantly, what have i fucked up least?

in the past year, i had the balls to leave a job where i was unhappy and the aptitude to choose a job that i (relatively and occasionally) enjoy. i adopted two sons who make me look forward to coming home at the end of every day. i lost some of the weight i've been meaning to lose for the last 3 years. i decided to leave myself open to the utmost rejection by applying to grad schools that are above even using my application as a tissue.

and i got my first hd-tv.

(while i'm mentioning firsts, this is my first birthday with a black eye. actually, this is my first black eye ever. details to be discussed in a future post).

more intriguing, and certainly more frightening, are the unknown firsts that lie ahead in the coming year.

and so, while i continue to hate my birthday and the brief period where others force me to feel more special then i deserve, i have a whole slew of pending rejection letters to remind me that i'm really not so special 364-days-of-the-year afterall.

maybe i hate my birthday because i resent the fact that there are too many people around me who (pretend to?) like me enough to refuse to let me "suddenly realize" one day that it's my birthday.

and if that's the case, then my resentment is probably in the wrong place.

which would be pretty typical of me anyway.