Birthdays

My buddy Tim is one of the best and funniest writers I know and he recently posted the below on his blog.

I have to rip it off because while I fancy myself an average-to-ok writer and am capable of being funny at times, I will never be as gifted with words or thoughts or be as brilliantly funny as someone like Tim or Meghan is.

So here it is:

From Underneath the Turban:

I recently turned 28. Kind of a lot of years. Like, if someone got a job when I was born, they could say shit now like, “I’ve been at this company for 28 years.” Or if two siblings got in a horrible fight when I was born and stopped speaking, they’d tell people about it now and they’d be like, “We haven’t spoken in 28 years.” Someone who was my age when I was born is currently 56 and someone who was just born was -28 when I was born. When I was -28 it was 1953. I’m a third of the way to 84 and to saying almost entirely irrelevant things (as opposed to now). The 80’s are to this decade we’re about to enter next month (the teens?) what the 50’s were to the 80’s. So, when I was young in the 80’s and someone would talk about the 50’s, that’s how the 80’s will sound to someone born now (and the 50’s will seem as old-fashioned to today’s baby as the 20’s seems to me). Or put it this way—in Back to the Future, the “present” is 1985, the “past” is 1955, and the “future” is 2015. In the movie’s version of the “past,” sodas cost two cents, TV was just invented, and Earth Angel was the current pop hit. If a new version of the movie came out today, people in the same ancient “past” would be watching the Michael J. Fox version of Back to the Future and listening to Madonna.

That’s all. Just a one-paragraph crisis this year.

The only other comment I’ll add is that it’s incredibly hard to figure out what to do with your face while people are singing you Happy Birthday. It’s a pretty unique and terrible 20 seconds, and the worst part for me is trying to figure out what to do with my face. Like, you can’t sit there lifeless, obviously. And very few people can sit there with a smile plastered on their face without sucking. The “face in your hands” move is extremely useful while it lasts but it expires at the age of 7. If you’re a particularly sappy type of girl, you can get away with the 60% smiling, 40% about-to-cry face the whole time. But for most, you kind of have only one option: the “yeah yeah yeah okay haha good funny you really got me this time now that’s enough stop it haha you win this one” face for 20 straight seconds. You know the one. And it’s not a stagnant face. I’m moving almost the entire time—sarcastically bobbing the head back and forth to the song, “yeah yeah yeah” head nods, looking this way and that to avoid making extended eye contact with anyone. I dust that one off every November.

Turban articulates everything I think and feel in a way I never could.

Tim, please write a sitcom.