Ask me: birthday

Michelle inquires:

When is your birthday?

I think, actually, that because there are a few readers who might rat me out on this score, I should start by saying that even if my birthday were a subject I wanted to talk about, I wouldn't be inclined to do it here. I doubt I have too many secrets at this point with this blog, which isn't something I personally mind except for the fact that a lot of idiotic corporations I do business with have no idea how to implement security in an online age and thus have established pretenses of security that involve confirming my identity through various questions which can only be answered by myself and anybody who can use Google. Commonsense would be for me to have lied to them when I gave them some of these answers to "security questions," except, of course, I'm not likely to remember those lies for the most part and therefore that would be a surprisingly useless measure. Maybe in the future I'll have the savvy to try to give answers that reflect a fictional character whose bio I'm overly familiar with--I was born on Polis Massa, my favorite color is black, my mother's maiden name was Amidala, my pet is named Artoo--but in the meanwhile I have to live with the wake of answers I've left behind. My birthday, ironically, which is probably available somewhere on the Internet, is one of the few pieces of verification I have that I haven't published myself.

So don't rat me out--especially not the family member who, in ratting me out, would be divulging a code she uses with her corporate cell phone account, ahem.

Why am I private about my birthday? This is the question I suspect is nagging at Michelle. The problem with trying to explain the irrational is buried in the concept, isn't it? If I had a rational thing about my birthday, I could say what it was, even if it were irrationally rational--e.g. some phobia, the time a manhole-sized spider dropped on my back on my birthday or the time a wayward priest told me he had a "present" under his cassock. There's no trauma I can recall, it's just something I came to detest over time and an occasion I became happy to, as Hamlet put it, honor in the breach. And while I understand that the friends who want to know when my birthday occurs and the family members who want to acknowledge it mean well--well, it'd be nice if they honored my birthday as I do; it's a weird thing to be in a situation where you feel rude about not appreciating people who mean well in their disregard of an easily-acceded to wish.

So, thank you for asking, Michelle. And that's about all I can say about that.

Next answer should be up tomorrow!