Rites Of Passage

I'm just going to throw it out there and say how much I despise birthdays. I've mentioned before how much I hate change, and nothing throws it in your face more than a celebration marking the passage of time. Birthdays were originally meant to be celebrated because it was a miracle in itself if you lived another year. Without the modern miracles of medicine or online shopping, our forefathers were pretty screwed if they became ill or lost the will to live.

In every persons life there are these supposed milestones one is supposed to celebrate. The first one would obviously be birth. The second would be age five when you receive the pony you had been patiently waiting for all year...and still continue to wait for to this very day. Thanks Dad. The third (in the Jewish tradition) would be your Bar/Bat Mitzvah, where an entire crowd is blessed with your mumbled and fast paced chanting of the Torah. You are pronounced an "adult" and the audience hurls candy at you. After wards there is an open bar where Mrs. Leibowitz drinks too much, tells her son he was a mistake, and vomits in the bushes outside the Temple. Then there is the sweet sixteen for the non-Jews or the conveniently wealthy. The next step would be your eighteenth, or high school graduation/baby shower for the girls lacking in the scholarly minds department. After all that there is the twenty-first birthday, where you're supposed to celebrate "finally" being legal, and do body shots until someone accidentally swallows your belly button ring. I had my fake twenty-first in Philly, and I will say that I had a good time. However, I felt like I had some sort of social obligation to go out for my real twenty-first, in a city I had moved to two days prior and know no one. To make it short I ended up sitting in a bar alone and drinking a Guinness. Watching the pouring rain outside while the sad old man next to me sang along to "Stairway to Heaven" was one of the most maudlin/amusing moments in recent memory. At least it was a Monday.

Oh and happy Passover. I remembered this little fact right after I finished my BLT at lunch. So wrong yet so worth it.