Big Birthday Revolution

Audio version now available.

My dad’s birthday was a couple of weeks ago. I didn’t send him a card. I called him on his birthday, but I got his voicemail, so I left a message. We didn’t talk until the next weekend. By then, it just felt like it had been too long to re-wish him a happy birthday, so I didn’t. He reads my blog, so Dad, happy birthday. There. A voicemail and an interweb shout-out.

I still feel guilty. And conflicted.

I am not conflicted about my hope that my dad enjoyed his birthday. I do, most sincerely. He is overseeing a kitchen renovation, and there are delays, and while he is unquestionably better in retirement, patience is not an attribute closely associated with my father, so he most likely spent his birthday frustrated. I guess I don’t see how a piece of folded cardstock from me would have helped. Had I magically hung his cabinets that the contractor forgot to order–now that would have been a birthday gift to remember.

I’m conflicted because I’m on a personal mission to change our culture. No, not around alcohol. Well, that too, but that’s not what I’m ranting about at the moment. I am on a personal mission to expose the Big Birthday industry for the ransom-wielding fraud that it is. I haven’t sent anyone a birthday card since, well, since shortly after I got sober a decade ago. And while I remain steadfastly committed to my cause, I seem to be having absolutely no societal impact. And while I feel noble and righteous, I am also tormented by the disappointed mumbles of the people I love assuming that I am thoughtless rather than virtuous. “Well, I guess Matt forgot my birthday again.” The guilt that accompanies a glance at my Google calendar is thick with awareness of the misunderstanding of my dedication to my pursuit.

We have been brainwashed to make a special trip to Walgreens, grumble about the bad options that miss the sentimentality mark in various directions, then drop–I don’t know–$2 or $5 or $10 or $20 (I know what inflation has done to my burrito order at Chipotle, but as I said, I haven’t bought a birthday card in like ten years, so I can only assume the price would piss me off). Then we find a stamp, try to get uninterested children to co-sign, and drop the card in the mail knowing it will be rotting in a landfill within a month.

I once ripped a birthday card in half and tossed it in the trash can right in front of the girl who gave it to me. I lived in a nine-by-nine fraternity room that I shared with another sloppy, inconsiderate guy. I meant my birthday well-wisher no disrespect, I just forgot to wait until she left the room before I discarded the clutter.

I have an aunt that used to mail me a manilla envelope once a year. The envelope contained birthday cards addressed to my wife and me and our four children. There were also Christmas cards and glittered tree ornaments in there, too. In one quite organized trip to the Hallmark store, she successfully passed the baton of remembering to complete the distribution sequence to me. When the new manilla envelope came each year, I remembered where I hid the one from the previous year, gave everyone their belated cards, and tucked the new bounty away to be forgotten. This process carried with it a different composition of guilt laced with contempt.

The only thing that feels less worthy of our slave-like obedience to this ridiculous birthday-card ritual is extending birthday wishes on facebook. My disdain for sending birthday cards is an amalgamation of wasted time, wasted money, wasted federal-employee labor, and post-consumer waste. My disdain for birthday wishes on facebook is because it is the equivalent of saying, “I love you, I care about you, but I made no effort to remember your birthday, and I have allotted four seconds at the absolute maximum to maintaining our relationship, which I treasure deeply.” I do not wish people happy birthday through social media, and I carry absolutely no guilt or feelings of conflict for my defiant anti-participation.

Growing up, I lived out my middle-school years in Kansas City, home of Hallmark HQ and the associated Hallmark Visitor’s Center. Every time someone came to stay with my family, we took them to the Hallmark Museum. While I admit to being mesmerized watching the automatic bow-making machine, I spent most of my time in the video booth watching all the Hallmark TV commercials playing on a loop, and sobbing uncontrollably. When I majored in marketing in college, I learned that my tears lubricated the money-swindling gears of the Big Birthday industry’s manipulation machine.

And now, in midlife, I can accurately identify the source of my guilt. Logic be damned. Wasted money and wasted time are no match for watching a thirty-second movie of a wife’s longing embrace of her husband because, while he could not possibly think of the right words to say on his own, he trusted the spinning wire rack next to the Slurpee machine at the 7-Eleven to be his Cyrano de Bergerac.

So while my mission might be widely misunderstood, or at least disregarded as unworthy of any effort in a world so completely jam-packed with more important troubles, I will resist the ingrained and conditioned manipulation of a lifetime spent tangled in Big Birthday’s web, and continue to refuse participation in the birthday-card ritual. And I will attempt to engage in my defiance, guilt free.

I cannot help but give a tip-of-the-hat to my sobriety for making my devotion to birthday-card abstinence possible. I no longer drink to blackout, then wonder the next morning about jokes slurred at the expense of people I love. I no longer worry about the opinions of others, because I am now confident that the opinions of others are formed based on interactions with my true, authentic, unintoxicated self.

Now that I am not worried about looking like an inconsiderate asshole, it frees me up to actually be an inconsiderate asshole.

An asshole on a mission.

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