the epidemic of birthdays

I loathe narcissism, but I approve of vanity.
Diana Vreeland

is it just me or have birthdays gotten completely out of control? has our culture of self-indulgence, fueled by the "me" generation(the gen-Xers, gen-Yers, the internet generation, basically anyone born after 1970) given rise to an age of narcissism so perverse that it may never be reigned in.

how many people do you know that no longer even have a birth"day", but now have a birth"week". perhaps you, gentle reader, are one of them, one of those loathsome people who throw themselves multiple parties over the course of their birth"week" and somehow expect everyone they know to attend each and every one of them, lest they unleash an unrelenting trip of guilt upon them.

"but it's my birthday."

yeah, go fuck yourself.

i have a friend whose girlfriend actually had a birth"month". no, seriously, she did. she posted a daily countdown to her birthday on her myspace page and would go around to her friends pages and post comments like "17 days til my birthday". if that wasn't enough, i by proxy had to be subjected to a perpetual stream of anguish on what exactly "we" were going to do to adequately celebrate the little princess's passage through her mother's birth canal 23 years previously.

my vote was for a good old-fashioned public stoning.

that's not to say that all birthday celebrations are bad. some are actually very good. some friend's birthday celebrations have turned out to be some of the greatest times of my life. they're usually the ones that are of the low-key and humble variety and don't involve traveling to an exotic locale or outlaying a pile of cash just so that the honoree can bask in an orgy of adoration. but those such occasions are unfortunately few and far between.

personally, i've about had my fill of it. it's to the point that i'm about to send out an email blast to everyone that i know just to say "i don't give a shit about your fucking birthday so don't bother sending me the evite."

i loathe the evite by the way, a point that i've made previously in this forum. furthermore, i request that you especially don't send me an evite for your "birthday dinner", unless said "birthday dinner" is pre-arranged and the expenses have been taken care of prior to, otherwise somebody's getting fucked and usually it's yours truly.

i went to one of these little "birthday dinners" recently and it'll probably be the last. frankly, it's what inspired this little anti-birthday tirade of mine. as you can probably guess, i got fucked. what sucks is that i just knew i was gonna get fucked going in and that just pisses me off even more.

the situation was basically this...a "birthday dinner" for a female friend at a trendy downtown manhattan dining establishment. the attendees numbered around 15 or so, of which i knew one, the birthday girl. the other attendees consisted of a few of her girlfriends and a cadre of assorted dudes, all of which seemed to be cock-jousting with each other in hopes of getting into the pants of the birthday girl or one of her friends later in the evening.

i arrived fashionably late, in true cajun boy fashion, and ordered a cuban sandwich. i washed my cuban sandwich down with a diet coke and had a couple of beers as well.

all around me at the table there were mulitiple bottles of fine wine being ordered throughout the course of the dinner. it appeared to me as though every conceivable item on the appetizer menu was summoned from the kitchen. each entree ordered seemed to be steak. after the entrees were completed one guy took it upon himself to order what seemed like every dessert item on the menu. more bottles of fine wine were ordered up.

never once was i offered any of this. not a drop of wine or a single morsel of an appetizer. nor did i care for any. i was perfectly content with my cuban sandwich and beer.

finally, the bill came. predictably, it was at about this point that most of the girls at the table chose this moment in time to collectively make a run for the john or to go outside to smoke. the birthday girl was actually the only human with a vagina still at the table. she, to her credit, asked how much was the bill and how much it was that she owed. one of the aforementioned cock-jousters at this point picked up the bill and uttered "don't worry about it babe, it's your birthday, we've got it."

i pulled out my wallet and did some quick math in my head. the cuban sandwich, beer and diet coke totaled about 30 bucks with tax, so i pulled out $60 and passed it down to the general area that the bill had been placed. i figured 30 for what i consumed with tax plus a ten dollar tip plus another 20 bucks for my share of covering the birthday girl's dinner. i felt that $60 was more than adequate.

upon seeing this the douchebag with the bill looked at me and said "i'm gonna need $200 from each guy."

WHAT?!?!?!?!?!

i was, as you can imagine, taken aback.

"the guys are gonna cover the girls dude. it's %#$@&'s birthday. the guys are cover her and her friends."

chivalry, it appears, is not dead. i just wish someone would have warned me beforehand.

what sucks about a situation like this is that it's hard not to come off as a cheap dick if you have the courage to stand up for yourself, but i didn't know any of these girls at the table and i wasn't about to subsidize their carrie bradshaw lifestyle aspirations, so i stood my ground. sort of. i stated my case, and yes i was the only non-douche at the table who seemed to find fallacy with this, and we settled that i'd throw in a $100.

so yeah, i still got fucked, just not as long and as hard as i could have been.

it just never seems to end.

i got a call today from a friend who lives in LA. she hails originally from the nyc metropolitan area and her family still lives here. she mentioned to me that her little sister was turning 16 and that she was trying to help her family plan a "super sweet 16" style party for little sis. she asked if i could work some of my manhattan nightlife connections to get a discounted rate someplace. now keep in mind that we're not talking about a VFW hall here. they're wanting to rent out a prime manhattan nightclub/lounge for the night, the cost of which, even on the low end, amounts to tens of thousands of dollars. these are venues that movie premiere and awards ceremony after-parties are held. what's odd to me is the fact that my friend didn't find anything too odd or extravagent about this.

even our animals are getting in on the act. there is a doggie day care that i pass about a dozen times a day on 13th st that throws doggie birthday parties. i see them regularly through the window. there's something simultaneously cute and revolting in extending the birthday narcissism to our animals.

it's been a standing belief of mine that the only person worthy of being celebrated on a person's birthday is their mother. it was their mother after all who carried them term and nurtured them into adulthood rather than aborting them as fetuses.

thanks for allowing me to vent this. with that said my birthday is coming up pretty soon. i'll be sure to post my wishlist here in the event you'd like to get me something.