Happy Birthday

The burdensome December marches on as the Christmas carol continues to play. The drum rolls are picking up with shoppers flooding in and out of stores and streets collapse in hopeless halt at times. There is no month as frustrating as December for me. On top of all Christmas shopping and gift wrapping, we have yet a wedding anniversary and birthday to face. As the numbers crunch up for both events, we have slowly adapted an unspoken “no tell, no fuss” policy. Instead of causes for celebration, they became somewhat cruel reminders of youth gone and thus grounds for mourning. Birthday, especially, with or without the big O, is my worst fear.

Coming from a different culture when birthdays are seldom honored except for significant number such as 1, 50, 70 or 80, I have never regarded them with such deliberate attention as Americans would do even after decades of rooting here in this country. When the children were young, we did make some effort to do something special, but never anything elaborated. When celebrated, they were always kept within the family. For us, the adults, we do even less. The big 4 ‘O’ is the milestone when celebration officially transitioned to lamentation and then a hush-hush shame as years go by.

In contrast to us, my coworkers here have been faithfully and joyfully celebrating birthdays as most people do. Once in a while, emails of invite will be sent out for going out to lunch in honor of someone’s birthday. Sometimes they would take a step further to surprise the birthday boy/girl with balloons and streamers all decked up in his cube. I would then feel sorry for the poor victim being a public spectacle like that and rejoice it wasn’t me. After over one and half year, I remain a bystander in both social events and personal life. My gruff exterior is there to repel unwanted attention on my space, my birthday included, which is to remain anonymous, left alone or non-existent.

And that was why I stood there, mouth dropped open, dumbfounded and perplexed when I walked into that nightmare on that birthday morning: my cube filled with colorful balloons, streamers and ribbons everywhere. It was 4:40 in the morning. The office was dark and deserted and yet I felt totally exposed as if being caught half naked. The spot light was on; I was alone on the center stage and the audience below was screaming in their laughter.

How should a scrooge like me, after the shock, handle a crisis such as this? On top of all the mixed emotions, my brain was racing hard to sort out some proper solution to the predicament I was in. My first instinct was to tear down all the intrusion from above the ceiling to every inch of my 4’ x 6’ floor. I started by cutting one balloon, which resulted in an unexpected pop and scared me half to death. My only company at that very hour in the morning was another coworker of the same floor. I was sure he jumped at the loud pop too. I could not risk continuing to terrorize both of us, so I resolved to take down the streamers, banners and balloons from the walls, cabinets and ceiling. In my irrational frenzy I was thinking only to bury or destroy all the evidences of my public humiliation. There were, however, brief and yet distinct moments when I suspected that these people whom I have closely guarded and kept off for so long might actually like me – for whatever reasons I could not tell. I am the gruff and rigid old bone that is unbendable and unmixable. Except for work, I have nothing in common with them. I am used to be set apart from their chit chats, out lunching and IMing. It bothered me in the beginning that I was not adorable here as all vein people would do, but I was finally fine with it. Does this fuss mean otherwise? As a creature of habits, I found this confusing and unacceptable and at the same time frustrating as I was hit by the alarming revelation that I was almost happy!

My confusion continued on as the coworkers came in. Their displeasure in my “recovering acts” was evident. In fact, they were mad at me. While I considered their actions offensive, they considered mine even more so. I was the criminal and they were the victims. In my pathetic effort for making truce, I managed to come to this deduction: they had invaded my space of privacy but I was to enjoy and appreciate it – at least till they came in to witness (using their words). The result was ironic: I ended up spending the rest of the day trying to apologize as a dutiful citizen on earth with etiquettes would do when I struggled but failed in my quest for justice or answer to yet another mystification of life.

On 2009 birthday of mine, I reaffirmed two precious, ancient-old truth: (1) you cannot please everyone; it’s either me or the rest of the world. (2) Birthdays should not be casually celebrated except for 1, 50, 70 or 80.

As far as birthdays are concerned, the Chinese are indeed wise after all.