01633: Kicking Off the Birthday Month

Who makes a birthday cake on FIRE?

Well it's the first day of August - my birth month. I've done a bunch of different things over the year to mark this period like writing a series of blog posts talking about different parts of my childhood, or a series of blog posts about little quirks about me and other such things.  And yes, I occasionally run birthday wish lists just for the heck of things.

And many times I've done absolutely nothing special or particular for this period. A birthday is just a birthday is just a birthday - it's just a date of pure, well, happenstance. I didn't get to pick my birthday. I didn't have to do anything to make it my birthday. It was merely the day that I was born. But the conventions of our society put some degree of importance and significance on our day of birth, and so we go through all the trappings.

I don't know if I want anything "special" to happen, for that matter. Do I want to go through the inconvenience of putting together an event and figuring out whether this friend or that acquaintance should be a part of it? And I know I'm not alone in this kind of thinking - when the luster of childhood is gone, I'm pretty sure we all reach that point in our lives when we go through this line of thinking. Do we want a party? Do we want to make a trip? Do we want to take the day off from work? And so on and so forth.

Well, there's no sense in over thinking these sorts of things. I suppose we'll just wait and see how the month goes and what will actually happen on that particular day.