A birthday is supposed to be a big thing, so my buddies say – the men want me to take them to the bar and well, the women, phew, they want everything or actually nothing really. This fuss over growing one year older is too much. Look, I could have chosen to celebrate the three month or six month or nine month mark of the year but here I am supposedly on my big day, completely suffocated of my right to oxygen as if the world is about to end, or begin now. I don’t feel any more or any less aged, but at least by one of crazy companions expectations, I should be weeping hard because I have not yet done the socially acceptable thing a man my age, or older or younger, should be doing – consigning some unfortunate girl to wearing my ugly surname for the rest of her life for such an absurd reason such as everlasting love. I don’t disagree too much with him, perhaps by delaying the inevitable longer; I get to reduce the time this someone will have to put up with my annoying habits, like putting penning down this column a huge priority ahead of going out to celebrate my birthday with ‘loved’ ones. I do not expect women to understand these things, but hey, men are from Mars and women from Venus. We just have to learn to put up with each other. So much for a warped sense of priorities! The late Aaliyah, in her Age Aint Nothing But A Number hit, wrote down the script of life and age and added some meaning to it by secretly marrying her mentor, singer R. Kelly at only fifteen. Sometimes I kind of agree with her. Here I am, struggling to put some sense into this day, worried that perhaps I might have grown longer (way beyond tall) during the night which for me is similar to a nightmarish experience. On the other hand, I feel ageless. Life can not be any better when every morning the rays of the sun shake that little reluctance to get out of bed out of you, with promises of a new better day, new people, new challenges, and even new opportunities to freshen up the old relationships with men and women. During that moment, age does not feature anywhere, only life, and lots of new wonderful possibilities, everything unfortunate, and forgettable already swept into the past, becoming a nice piece of history. On second thoughts, I have decided to stop being selfish once and make some people happy for no reason other than for its own sake, so am going to give quality time to whoever feels like I owe them the right. And this is not because I grew one year older today. It is only because am not sure what it means to grow one or two or three or four years older. I can only assure you that tomorrow will be a better day than today, and next year will be a better year than this year. Have an unselfish Sunday. kelviod@yahoo.com
