Birthdates with benefits A co-worker of mine is having her birthday tomorrow. I told her July 1st is one cool day for a Canadian to have a birthday. →[More:]It’s a stat holiday, so she’ll never have to work or go to school on that day. Everyone else has the day off so they can celebrate her birthday with her, and unlike Christmas, July 1st isn’t a present-buying occasion, so people will have money to spend on her gift. There are also fireworks and parades and picnics and concerts galore on that day, which she can enjoy. She says she always assumes they are for her. And that, though she wasn’t born in Canada, she doesn’t ever want to move away and lose her birthday benefits.

I always liked my birthday being on August 14th because it was in summer and I didn’t have to go to school on my birthday (my poor niece Pumpkin always has to start the school year on her birthday, September 2), and it was six months from Valentine’s Day, so that was my “half-birthday”. There was that Eastern seaboard blackout thing on my thirtieth birthday, which kind of sucked, but otherwise I was happy being born on that day, but I must admit I probably would have liked a July 1st birthdate even more.

A former co-worker of mine was born on April 1st, which I always thought poetically appropriate, being that she is, well, loud and obnoxious. Someone else I know who is something of a disaster (several failed marriages, substance abuse problems, financial management problems, and *everything* is all someone else's fault) was born on April 14th, which is the night the Titanic sank. And a guy I know was born on October 30, less than an hour before Halloween was to begin. He’s a macabre kind of guy who has adopted the zombie as his personal symbol/mascot, so I told him it was a shame that he had to be such a heedless little fetus. He agreed, but said that October 30th was Devil’s Night, which wasn’t too bad for second place.