I’m in Palm Springs, visiting my grandparents here for the day. I was going to drive back tonight, but it’s still wet outside and I’d rather wait until tomorrow morning and exchange darkness for traffic. In one minute it’s going to be my birthday. There we go. I’ve never done anything big for birthdays, except when I was little and had birthday parties. Now, just a nice family dinner where I get to specify the menu. What should I have? My little brother has already volunteered to specify my menu and says steak; I say that’s not a bad idea. Birthday parties when I was little: Those were fun. Most memorable experience is of a friend of mine singing “happy birthday to washing-machine!” because my birthday is the same as George Washington’s. So now you know. Don’t use this information to steal my identity, ok? (I think anyone determined enough would be able to find that information in public databases, anyway. So my plea is directed at the casual identity thief.)

Sometimes friends ask me what I’m going to do (expecting a lavish party or something, who knows what their overactive imaginations hold) and I’m probably letting them down by saying “nothing much”, but in a way I’d rather it just be another day. I suppose there are two ways of looking at it.

One way is like sleep. In general, when I think of days, I don’t think of them as being divided, one from another, by an arbitrary time like 12:00 AM; I think of them as being divided by sleeping periods. For example, even though now it’s technically Tuesday, it’s still part of the same “day” as far as I’m concerned. When I go to sleep and wake up, it’ll be a new day. That means an all-nighter leads to my having a strange sense of the current day, since it’s really one day, but a day with two mornings and two afternoons and maybe two evenings… but it doesn’t feel like so much time has passed. Maybe because I think of a day as starting when I wake up and get out of bed, and not having that as a reference point means that a new day never really started. A birthday is like 12:00 AM. It’s an arbitrary point which divides ages, just as midnight is an arbitrary point which divides days, both being for logical purposes of letting us communicate with others and have standard definitions of things. So what’s the “real” divider of ages? What says that now I’m one year older just as going to sleep and waking up says that now a new day has started? Maybe there isn’t one and I’d rather just see life as one continuous amount of time not punctuated by years. Why even view days that way? (That’s a dangerous view, though… it leads one to sleeping whenever one wants and floating around the clock not in synchrony with daylight or anyone else’s schedule. Anyway, that doesn’t work when one needs to be available to meet with or have calls with others at specific times, which would be during standard business hours.)

The other view of birthdays compares them to new years, or new school terms, or anything that provides a fresh start. Now it’s the first day of my being this age, and here is a fresh chance to make this the best year I’ve lived yet. Just like we have New Year’s Resolutions, or an attitude at the beginning of a semester that “I’m going to study hard and remain focused and not fall behind in any class and get straight A’s; I’ll start my homework when it’s assigned and not wait until the last minute for anything; I’ll do all the assigned reading right away and start studying a week before each exam to give myself plenty of time and consequently not ever have to feel stress when the exam looms because I’ll be confident that I know all the material” and so on. Why not birthday resolutions? Today’s as good a reference point as any.

(It’s been a while since I wrote the above.) So maybe it’s just another day. But the steaks are about to go on the grill…