On birthdays and things...

There’s a part in my favorite childhood book where Smidge and Karlson are trying to split a peach. They need a knife to cut the peach in half and before Smidge can fetch it from the kitchen, Karlson quickly finishes the peach and hands him what he calls the best part of the fruit– the big and sticky pit.

‘I always want you to have the best bit,’ he says. ‘If you plant this pit, you’ll get a whole peach tree stuffed full of peaches. You’ve got to admit I’m the world’s kindest Karlson, not making a fuss even though I only got one miserable little peach… A whole big peach tree! Think of that! At your fiftieth birthday party you’ll be able to give every last guest a peach for dessert, won’t that be nice?’

This has long become one of the favorite skits of my family. Recently, as my brother handed me the sticky pit of the peach that we were enjoying one afternoon, I caught myself thinking about how lovely it would be to have a peach tree on one's fiftieth birthday. “Let’s try to figure out when we’re going to celebrate our fiftieth birthdays,” I said, without putting much thought to what I was saying. “What an idiot you are,” said my brother before I realized what a retarded thing I had just said. “We’ll celebrate them tomorrow, how about that?” he continued, bursting into laughter. This is the part where those of my readers who think that I have even an ounce of intelligence are kindly asked to reassess their prior beliefs…

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I was born on a cold Thursday, ten days after John Lennon was shot (you do the math). Nothing particularly significant about the day, except that it was the day when my grandfather got his license suspended when trying to rush my mother to the hospital. A day before my birth doctors had reassured my mother that I wouldn’t be due until a week after New Year’s. And were they all wrong! It is also worthy to note that I was supposed (expected) to be a boy. In fact, they were so sure about it that nobody entertained the fact that there’s a fifty percent chance of it NOT happening and when I came out of the womb without a penis, everybody assumed that it (the penis) got lost in the dark and murky corners of the birth canal. And since nobody had bothered to come up with a suitable name for a girl, for the first couple of months everybody called me Bob (or so they say). Eventually my mother named me Shushanika after her grandmother who wasn’t really her grandmother in biological sense, but that’s an entirely different story altogether.

I was never particularly fond of my birthday. And the older I grew, the more apathetic I became about the whole thing. It’s in an awkward time of year – cold and crappy. It’s a week before Christmas when the last thing one needs is to worry about celebrating a birthday. As long as I have been in school, my birthday has been during the most inappropriate time of the semester – right amidst the finals. Add to that the fact that I’m not usually big on birthday planning and you got the most boring birthday one could possible have year in year out. I am not sure whether it’s the lack of planning that makes me feel so apathetic on the day of my birthday or the other way around, but the long short of it is that I HATE THE TIME OF YEAR THAT I WAS BORN. I don’t think I could be more emphatic about it.

To correct what I perceive as fundamental injustice of birthday deprivation, I have decided to celebrate my birthday any day I want and while I’m at it, why not have not one, but SEVERAL birthdays throughout the year? “Great!” thinks the boy “now I have that many more occasions to completely fuck this up,” as he tries to convince me that there’s nothing wrong with the day I was born and that I can’t just randomly have a birthday whenever the hell I want. So for those of you who have a problem with the term “birthday”, you can call these days “Nika Days”, “Nika Appreciation Days” or whatever have you, as long as there are red balloons involved.

So today is one of those days when I let myself and others around me “appreciate” the fact that I, indeed, exist. This is actually the main idea behind the whole thing – celebration of being rather than becoming. After all, what’s the point of it all if I can’t indulge in occasional frivolity like this? And if you’re looking for a way to show your own appreciation, feel free to have a cupcake or two in my honor, today or any other day you want.