Yesterday was my birthday.
I turned 20.
The day passed in a revelry of classes, work and the classic mundane monotony of Thursdays. (At least, I assume this. My deadline is at 3 p.m., so for all I know I ended in up Mexico with a Russian revolutionary, bull riding while hopped up on crack-cocaine.)
And thus was the demise of my teenage years.
Eighteenth-century poet Robert Southey, the very same wise man who wrote the Goldilocks story, said in his collection “The Doctor” – “Live as long as you may. The first twenty years are the longest half of your life.”
Well, damn.
So all I have to remember this end of the longest period of my life by is a news story about a U.S. senator who likes to tap his foot in bathrooms to get tapped himself and a handful of Facebook.com wall posts that resurrect people from the past and chronicle this monumental occasion.
What I find interesting about these wall posts is that most people capitalize the word “birthday” in the phrase “(ZOMG) Happy Birthday!!!!!” Well, give or take a “!”
In Western culture, the birthday is a day of vast importance, in fact possibly the most important day of the year for the person having it.
But like most anniversaries, instead of celebrating what it claims to – in this case, birth – it celebrates the fact that something didn’t happen. It celebrates that we are not dead.
We assume celebrations mean that the opposite of the celebrated event would be a disappointment. Death is not the opposite of birth. Not being born is the opposite of birth. So had I never been born I would never be missed.
Ignorance is bliss, right?
As soon as death inevitably strikes, birthdays are quickly forgotten (with the exception of Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr. and other famous leaders).
Birthdays are like Lindsay Lohan, the actress celebrated for being childishly pure. Everyone loved her for what she had not done – specifically, released a movie (“I Know Who Killed Me”) in which she plays a dead stripper and then, just after the film’s release, got caught with a car full of cocaine.
Now she is slowly slipping from the public view. She may still dominate a few headlines, but Entertainment Weekly ran a story claiming she may never have another movie deal in the near future, because no one hates her but no one loves her. She has earned the diametric opposite of both those things – indifference.
No one cares about Lindsay Lohan.
And no one cares about birthdays, simply the fact that we are not dead.
Yet we celebrate them. We revel in life, perhaps fall into an Epicurean coma for a night. And we will be congratulated every year on that anniversary of popping out of our mothers (Why do we celebrate this instead of conception?). We will thunder on, our plastic plates of birthday cake strewn about, covered in white icing, and our cups of beer sticky from the tumultuous night, stuck to our hands like the cold steel of rifles in the hands of dead soldiers.
And in the morning we will still be alive, teenager or not.
And no one will care about Lindsay Lohan.
And here is a list of this week’s entertainment births – media, not babies.
MUSIC
Sept. 3Once upon a Time in the West by Hard-Fi
Sept. 4I Created Disco by Calvin HarrisGoing Way Out With Heavy TrashPlay it as it Lays by Patti Scialfa
MOVIESAug. 31NATIONALHalloweenDeath SentenceLIMITEDExiledFreshman OrientationLadron Que Roba a LadronThe NinesSelf-Medicated
Sept. 5LIMITEDI Want Something to Eat Cheese With
DVDSSept. 4Believe in MeDelta FarceGeorgia RuleI’m Reed FishStephanie DaleyWind ChillThe Wind that Shakes the Barley
—-Contact Travis Andrews at [email protected]