Notes on Birthdays

How Picard and I both feel about birthdays.

Sad birthday to it,
Sad birthday to it,
Sad birthday to the human,
Sad birthday to it.
—"Gollum Sings You Sad Birthday," James Walters

I turned 27 a few weeks ago, and this past weekend I had a birthday party with some friends. Both events were excellent.

My earliest birthday memory is associated not with my birthday but a friend's. He was a kid I knew from camp, and I kind of idolized him, so I was stoked to go to his birthday party. I have no clear memory of the party itself (there was, most likely, Nintendo), but it must have been a heck of a time, because when I awoke the next day and went looking for my clothes so I could change out of my PJs, my pants were nowhere to be found. "Pantsless James" was my nickname in that household from then on.

My worst birthday was undoubtedly the one during my sixth grade year; I'd just entered a new school system, and I invited two friends to come to a birthday bowling party. Neither showed up, so I glumly bowled with my dad and and ate my birthday cake by myself. Of course, looking back, I know it would have still been a terrible party if they'd showed up, since they didn't know each other or me very well and we were all awkward tweens.

Best birthday is a tossup. I've had lots of good birthdays: when I started college, I realized that only I had the power to make my birthdays awesome now, and I decided to pursue that with gusto. A typical birthday for me these days is an excuse to invite a crowd of people over to my house for pizza and conversation. If possible, I hold it jointly with friends whose birthday is at the same time, so we can have my friends and their friends also. My goal at these parties is to get people from unrelated friend groups to talk to each other. There's something magical about introducing two people who seem like they'll get along, and then discovering that, hey, they like each other, and you were the reason they met!

This year's birthday party had the fewest friends I've invited in a while, in part because it was not a joint birthday party with anyone else. Happily, we did have enough people to play my one of my favorite party games. I'm not sure of the name, but it's a kind of race: there are two teams, each sitting in a straight line. The people in the line hold hands with the folks next to them, and close their eyes. The last person in each line holds a spoon over a metal pot. The first person in each line has their eyes open, and is watching someone flip a quarter. When the quarter comes up heads, the person watching the quarter on each team squeezes the hand of the person next to them, and that person squeezes the next hand, and so on; when the last person feels their hand squeezed, they bang the pot with the spoon, and whichever team bangs the pot first, gets a point. Players rotate through all positions, and when everyone has had a turn to bang the pot and watch the quarter, the points are tallied and the team with the most wins!

These were the participants.

I like explaining things to people, so not only is playing this game fun, teaching people the game is fun for me, too. I have to plan quickly in my head how to lay it out, how to word things so it's not confusing, and I have to stay on my toes to notice anything going wrong, anything I missed in the initial description. The game went smoothly; we ended up creating a penalty for false starts, because there were a lot of accidental hand squeezes at the start of the game.

As far as I can recall, this is the first year when I did something special on my birthday itself, rather than just enjoying myself at my party. 2013 wasn't really the hottest year for movies, but there were a few I'd missed and really wanted to see. I took my birthday off from work, and I tracked down times to go see Her and Inside Llewyn Davis; the latter I wanted to see because I try to see anything the Coen Bros make, and the former because it was the first new film The Dissolve has given a perfect rating to. Also, they both sounded cool.

And they were! I loved Her's ability to use a sci-fi premise to explore human emotions and experiences, through questions about artificial intelligence and the possibility of intimacy without physical presence. And I loved Inside Llewyn Davis's clear affection for the music and the period it depicted, contrasted with the detachment of its main character. I ended up crossing Chicago in a blizzard to get to the movie theater, the Landmark Century, and I hung out in one of my favorite bookstores, Unabridged Bookstore, in between the films. As I headed home, I called my parents, and they graciously wished me a happy birthday from a sweltering canyon in Arizona where they were on vacation.

Birthdays are great, but typically a birthday can only be really great if I choose to make it so.

It's My Birthday, Let Me Tell You About It

Music for this week:
Kangding Qingge (Old Timey Dance Party), Abigail Washburn and the Sparrow Quartet


It's my birthday today, so I'm going to record what it's been like for me to turn 25.

Every year since a long while now, I've had friends who had birthdays in close proximity to mine, and we've celebrated them jointly. This year was no exception, though the full complement of friends was not there, sadly, since several have moved to the coasts. My roommate and I, however, invited all the friends we could think of to our house to celebrate with us--she a day after, me six days before the actual birthday. We ordered massive amounts of pizza, ate people's baked goods, chips, dips, and other things. I drank about three root beers from glass bottles, my favorite thing. My roommate and I opened all our presents in front of everyone; she got mostly books (typography, visual art, comics), I mostly DVDs (Star Trek VI & Star Trek [JJ Abrams reboot], Venture Bros., Black Orpheus) as is fitting for folks with our interests. We somehow convinced all thirty-or-so people to play a party game together, The Bowl Game (Three Part Charades), and though it only lasted one round, we all had fun.

I've never managed to bring multiple groups of friends together to one party; I'm not a great party host (yet) and when I do have parties, it tends to be for just people I know from work, or from church, or from school. This party was the first real exception, and it was awesome. Making an introduction where you know each person is going to be happier for knowing the other is a fantastic feeling, and this party was the place for that. That feeling alone made turning 25 feel special.

Here are some other things that has made this birthday great so far: friends who realized they couldn't make the party all collaborating to take me out to a delicious dinner, cards from the grandparents, a joint valentine/birthday card & gift (traditional) from my parents, cupcakes and books to borrow from a friend at work (some long-form non-fiction, which I've been meaning to read more of but needed suggestions for), and the anticipation of a short road trip to camp with a friend this afternoon, of seeing my non-Chicago-residing sister at camp this evening, and of a bro-sis movie night with my Chicago-residing sister next week. Truly, it is good to be 25.

I'll end with this, a great thing a friend wrote about me for everyone to see; it made me feel special on my birthday (warning, minor inside jokes ahead):

Here are some facts about James:
1. FACT: James writes sweet lists about his friends and family on their birthdays. I am shamelessly stealing this idea from him.
2. FACT: James used to sit in the elevator of our dorm on Saturday nights with his guitar and play beautiful music for drunk people. Whenever he got a request, he would say mysteriously, "I don't play songs, only music." It was badass.
3. FACT: James is a seriously funny guy (cf. The Shea Butter Joke Incident of 2010).
4. FACT: James has a gift for the epigram. For example, he once consoled me by pointing out that "every breakup is different; each one is its own unique snowflake of pain."
5. FACT: James has impeccable taste. Without him, no one in Hale House would have discovered the crazy magic of Andy Palacio's "Watina."
6. FACT: He's a straight-up, all-around, off-the-charts nice guy. James, you're a swell dude and we're lucky to know you. Happy birthday, buddy.


Note: The Shea Butter Joke went as follows. What the heck is a shea, and how does it give us butter? Is it a sea creature? It sounds like a kind of shellfish to me. I can see it now, the traditional shea farmer/diver, speaking to his child, "Come, son, it is time to rise, don your wetsuit and scuba gear, and go forth into the sea to milk the mysterious shea of the deep, that we might have its butter to rub on our hands." This I generated on the spot at my friend's house on the sight of a bottle of shea butter soap, to the surprise and amusement of both of us.