TIME MACHINE: As-i-nine If You Want To
You would cry toooooo if it happened to you.
Happy birthday, Virgo. This year you turned a boring age, so I’m firing up the ol’ time machine to return you to an era when you were slightly less birthday ambivalent. Please enjoy this two year trip to the past. It’s Yesterday’s Horoscope, today!
Happy birthday, Virgo! You love your birthday, a fact about your personality you believe to be complex and fascinating (a la a peaty scotch), when all it really indicates is that you crave attention (a la a two liter of Diet Rite).
You and your husband share a birthday, which has only deepened your already acute birthday fever. Insisting on a day of lavishness no longer feels like a diva move, it feels selfless. No matter the litany of delight you cram into a single calendar day, you believe your actions are that of a team player—instead of a maladjusted adult.
Your desire to celebrate your birthday in expensive, memorable ways is at least partially due to a childhood of Having A Summer Birthday, which meant you couldn’t bring cupcakes to school and receive mandated affection from each of your peers.
You refused to be wholly left behind by this childhood rite of passage, and for two years brought cupcakes to school on the birthday of a celebrity you were deeply in love with (who will here remain anonymous as he’s since been revealed to be an absolute monster, and absolute monsters get plenty of attention already).
Just to be clear: you were a 10–11 year old girl, bringing cupcakes to school for other 10–11 year olds to celebrate the birth of a man in his mid-forties. Your class sang happy birthday to him! How did you convince multiple adults to agree to this?!
That said, plenty of people are born in the summer months and still manage to approach their birthday with humility and grace (conversely, you unzip your face at midnight to reveal a greedy black hole of birthday demands).
After much study, I have traced your issues back to birthdays 11, 13, and 21.
Most of your 11th birthday was spent at the eye doctor’s office, for three back-to-back appointments (none of which were your own).
At 13, your birthday was spent at an all-day 80th birthday party for someone else.
At 21, you were far too excited about your status as a legal drinker that you drank five different liquors by noon and missed your own birthday party.
As a certified birthday nuisance, you love announcing that you and your husband share a birthday—but not for the simple, innocent reasons a naive reader may assume. To you, sharing this fact is a social litmus test. You carefully observe the responses you receive, so you can separate the wheat from the chaff.
If someone replies with a simple, “Oh, cool” to learning of such grand, cosmic romance, you’re abruptly certain that your friendship with such an obtuse soul is limited (if not doomed).
The response you’re looking for (or you’d describe yourself as deserving) is unbridled enthusiasm. Shrieking, leaping, and intermediate gymnastics moves are all appropriate reactions to learning that some how, some way, two people who have chosen to spend their life together happen to have the same birthday.
Due to the felicity of your double birthday, you’ve slipped into a dangerous game of heightening your birthday each year—the meals become more elaborate, the spa treatments more niche. You’ve reached a critical point in your celebrations, where in order to escalate your birthday any further you would need to change professions (to a busy thief).
This year, the final event on your birthday itinerary is dinner at a fancy plant-based restaurant you’ve wanted to try for five years. You’ll excitedly tell the waiter it’s both of your birthdays, and although that sentence often feels like a lie in restaurants, he appears to believe you.
The restaurant is instantly a hilarious disappointment. It’ll feel like the restaurant is participating in a reality show with theatrically cruel ingredient limitations. Each course is somehow more bizarre than the last, which is truly saying something because the only conceivable explanation for the first course is that it’s a tool of propaganda, meant to convince the public that corn is repulsive.
If you were told that the food was invented by a spoiled child whose parents take each of their burgeoning talents too seriously and opened a restaurant in Manhattan to serve their inventive designs, you’d believe it without question.
But you’re not here for a restaurant review, Virgo (though I do recommend more closely reading them in the future). While you eat what you pray is the final course of the evening (essentially an onion ring, but tahini is present), the table beside you receives their dessert course. One man at the table has a candle in his dessert. You can’t find a way to steal his attention, to announce that it’s also both of your birthdays, so you allow him this brief moment center stage.
When your dessert course arrives, you’ll see that you both received birthday candles too. You can’t think of the last time you had a real birthday candle, and your brief joy almost leads you to forgetting you’re inside of a conceptual hellscape.
“Do you want to blow that out, real quick?” the server opposed to wishes will say to you. You’ll each blow out your birthday candles in disbelief, so that this stranger can explain to you what ice cream “is.”
Once you’ve wrapped your minds around their “take” on “dessert,” the birthday boy at the table beside you will finally make his move. You’ll establish that you all three share a birthday, and you’ll have a little giggle at this sweet coincidence. He’ll turn to face his group once more, pleased with the simple, short interaction. As his head turns away from you, you’ll mourn the end of the sweet birthday chat. You quickly try to think of something peppy and birthday-like to lure him back, but nothing comes to mind so you’ll say a little louder than necessary:
Is this your favorite place to celebrate your birthday?
This bizarre question lands like glass (when it shatters, not when it’s smooth and whole). Your question sounds like what one might be taught in an introductory lesson to a foreign language, but it certainly isn’t something one human would say to another.
Fittingly, your new birthday friend laughs at your words for a little while, before telling you that No, this isn’t his favorite place to celebrate his birthday.
Of course it isn’t! How could a place that brings jello full of green beans to your table and calls it a “little present from the kitchen” be someone’s favorite place to spend their birthday? While we’re at it, does anyone actually have a favorite place to celebrate their birthday? Has this escaped me as a classic category of favorite, a la movie, color, and season?
In all your time judging the birthday commentary of those around you, you’ve never stopped to consider how best to engage with other people’s birthdays. Which birthday litmus tests have you failed? Are you always the chaff?
I believe your robotic attempt at sharing excitement for another’s birthday can be a good lesson for you, Virgo. People won’t always know how to react when you demand exuberance on your birthday, nor will they always have a congratulatory dance routine to debut when you announce that you and your husband share a birthday. And that’s okay, because if you (the president of Taking Birthdays Way Too Seriously), still can’t manage to say something normal and celebratory to someone on their birthday, where’s the hope for the rest of humanity?
Without fail your posts ALWAYS make me laugh. It always makes my day better. It’s such good writing - thanks for sharing!
I honestly related to this on many levels because I both deeply care about birthdays and also kinda a little bit don't, and I'm always a) more hurt than I think I should be if someone fails to acknowledge my birthday in the way I wanted in my head but did not express and b) probably insensitive to how other people want their birthdays acknowledged because gift giving is last on my love languages list. ANYWAY, my reaction to this revelation that you and your husband share a birthday is that I must know MORE I must know if that was how you met (at a convention for people with that birthday? while having parallel parties at the same place?) or truly just a wild coincidence or what!