Birthday Blah

OK, so I haven't exactly been posting like a maniac since my marathon update, but at the same time it hasn't been two years since June. At least I hope not, or I am now moving into a new mental arena that I should perhaps investigate more thoroughly.

But regardless, today I'm posting because it's my birthday. I'm actually in a very good mood today even though I have three good reasons not to be...

1. I live in the tropics, but for some reason it is pissing down with rain, which happens every year at this time. Not just drizzling or raining heavily, but pissing down. The kind of pissing down that makes you stop in the street, half chewed chocolate bar in your mouth, wondering who just threw that bucket of water at you. I see people run when it rains like this, and I wonder why. I mean, it's not cold and you're already as wet as you can be so what's the point in running? And don't even get me started on the Thai populations belief that a 7-11 carrier bag on the head is likely to keep one dry during a monsoon. 

2. It's Monday. Birthdays on a Monday are shit. For starters you will probably have to work, or at least attend a lecture or course of some kind. But this is not the worst part. The worst part is that if you're lucky you've been spoiled by three previous years of weekend birthdays. Three years when you can completely cut loose on your birthday without fear that you just might have to vomit into a drawer at your desk, or wonder whether colleagues/clients/students can smell the poisonous and slightly toxic blend of fumes drifting from your every pore. Three years without worrying that the fart that is about to eek out of you, despite the tightest of clenchings, will immediately announce itself as something akin to Agent Orange that creates in the people around you various faces of horror, disgust, and in cases unconsciousness. It's quite depressing that this year you have either already celebrated, or will have to wait a few days to celebrate. Unless the above mentioned scenarios carry no fear for you, which quite frankly probably means you should be out i the general populous.

3. I am now 39.

I'm only around halfway through my first day of being 39 and already seven people have used the "oooh, it's the big one next year". Seven people, three of whom I have never actually met face to face before, have already written off this coming year of my life as some period of time that I simply have to get through in order to reach forty. Not one of these people asked my age, they simply jumped straight in there as though they have the psychic ability to sniff out that in 365 days I will be another year older. And why have they done this, aside from the fact that they are lacking in basic social skills? Because of Skype, that's why.

Now, I'm a man who knows how to use a computer in the modern world. I have a Facebook account that has privacy setting tweaked to my satisfaction, I Tweet through my days on a relatively regular basis without fear of attack. I'm even tinkering with Google+. But I lowered my guard to a little bit of software that generally does nothing but pass on my titbits of conversation to friends and co-workers. Software that does very little besides pass messages backwards and forwards. Perhaps this is why it is so malicious? Small software syndrome. Regardless, today anyone who has me as a contact on Skype received the following message :

"Mik Jennings turns 39 today"

Why? What's wrong with Facebook's "Mik Jennings has a birthday today"? Why the need to gleefully inform people of my age? It's not that I'm really concerned about being 39. Quite frankly most of my friends, and probably more than one of my close family relatives will tell you that I still behave like a man who has yet to leave his teens (which ,while not always said in such a way, I always receive as a complement). It just seems so rude to just throw it out there. It has irked me. And I just wanted you to know.