Birthday Enthusiasm

Tomorrow is my birthday. I’ve said it before, and I fully admit that this makes me kind of (ok, completely) a loser but I really, really love birthdays. Seriously, what’s not to love? You get to spend time with the people who you love the most, you get to eat cake, you sometimes get gifts – and now that I’m old, I get to drink as much as I want mid-week without getting in too much trouble at work the next day for being hung-over.

I never outgrew my childhood love of birthdays, so I look forward to mine every single year. The problem that I’m faced with now that I’m heading toward my 30's isn’t that my excitement about my birthday is starting to fade, it’s that everyone I know has gotten older too and their enthusiasm for birthdays in general has pretty much disappeared. It’s hard to muster up the same level of excitement as usual when the people you want to celebrate with can’t be bothered.

This situation clearly needs fixing. I can’t let birthday fun end before 30. For me, the day I don’t care that it’s my birthday is the day that I'm officially an old lady. And despite recent old lady-ish tendencies, I’m not ready for old-lady-hood yet.

So. How to make people enthused about birthdays again? I considered just throwing a big party, but not telling people it was a birthday party until they arrived. You know, letting them have fun for a while and then just wandering up and saying “Having fun? Great! Because this is actually a Birthday celebration! See, they are fun after all!”
But that seemed sneaky. And no-one likes a sneaky birthday girl. Besides, I didn’t really want a party. I think that once you’re past 10 years old, birthday parties are reserved for milestone birthdays only.

I thought that maybe if I just wore a party hat around all day, people would be amused enough to get more involved in birthday fun. Then I thought about it some more and realised that if I did that, people wouldn’t think it was because I love birthdays, they’d think that I was having some kind of early mid-life crisis and that I was trying to recapture my youth.
Which I guess I am, to some extent. Birthdays were just so fun when I was little, I’d like to have that kind of birthday fun every year. I suppose this kind of age crisis is better than buying myself a sports car and getting a boob job. This kind has cake.