I Turned 36 This Week and It's Not Looking Good

Birthday thoughts from the birthday boy 🎁

I turned 36 this week.

According to a friend, this means I’m due thirty-six birthday punches.

I’m not in love with this tradition, to be honest. I can handle the assault and battery, but I bet senior citizens start to get tight lips around their birthdays.

“Get in here, Grandma. We love you. Now sit down while your grandkids test that osteoporosis jaw ninety-six times!”

Beatings aside, birthdays can be sad for a lot of people — and I get it.

Ice cream cake at the office is a fun distraction from your inbox but also a reminder that time is flowing by. Milestone days force you to evaluate your progress, and maybe that’s why the risk of suicide goes up between 6% and 40% on birthdays — you’re reminded of what you’ve missed out on or lost.

Here’s a Birthday Flashback™: I got a hug from a girl on my 16th birthday, doubling as my first contact with the opposite sex. That triggered a four-hour erection, which was frustrating because she hugged me at school and in the morning.

Focusing in class is difficult when you’re harder than a math quiz. I sat through 40 minutes of Modern History without paying attention after that, which was frustrating because we were learning about WW2 that day, and I didn’t get to find out who won.

I’ve come a long way since then. Hopefully, more mature. Hopefully, less uncontrollable erections. Here are a few birthday thoughts to celebrate blowing out the candles.

Alexander, aged 10. Glasses, size XXXL

1. Social media birthday messages aren’t real: Well, they are real but not meaningful. Facebook notifications go “buzz” so everyone knows it’s your birthday. It’s nice to have a wall or feed or fall or weed full of messages, but the people who text or call are your people. They love you. They may also punch you. You can’t have one without the other.

2. Birthday celebrations aren’t always about you: I haven’t had a birthday party since I turned 21. The most popular girl from high school was also having her 21st that day, so I changed the date and blamed “administrative errors”, which didn’t make sense then or now. I’m not a party person, but I still let my family make a fuss because birthday celebrations are as much about them as you. If people love you, let them show it. Don’t be a dick and ruin their fun.

3. Calories don’t count on your birthday: You can’t spell nutrition without ‘no’ (it’s in there, you just have to move the letters around a bit). Say NO to restrictive diets and eat what you want on your birthday. Everyone knows calories stop working for those 24 hours, and anyone who says otherwise is a bum. Jab ‘em with a fork and dig in.

4. Bad gifts are the most memorable: The older you get, the funnier bad gifts are. My ex-girlfriend wrote me a song called “I Will Never Let You Down” as a gift, which was ironic because she was unfaithful and got an STI during our relationship. Don’t sulk if you get something terrible because the real gift is the story you can tell for the rest of your life.

5. Birthday cards are a place for mayhem: In a previous job, signing a novelty-sized birthday card for colleagues was a tradition. When it came to my desk, I’d add three or four birthday messages from people who did not exist. Sometimes, these contained imaginary in-jokes; other times, they implied sexual tension. Don’t go and put sexual innuendo on a card to your grandparents (that won’t read well in court if you subsequently beat them to death with birthday punches), but get creative. People remember when you put in effort because it shows you care.

6. There’s nothing more awkward than people singing ‘Happy Birthday’: No one knows what face to make. No matter your skill set, you are reduced to a weird blob of a human waiting politely for everyone to finish. I read somewhere that the awkwardness is because ‘Happy Birthday’ has no rhythm or beat, but I think it is the simmering tension that a child (aged 3 to 11) will substitute “You look like a monkey and you smell like one too” into the lyrics. Stay vigilant, people.

7. It’s OK to feel sad on your birthday: The Birthday Blues isn’t a clinical diagnosis, but experts also recommend not eating raw cake batter, so we can’t trust everything we hear. Various factors can contribute to feeling flat on your birthday, from fear of aging to unresolved birthday trauma and good old-fashioned existential terror. I believe it was Nietzsche who said, “If you stare into the abyss on your birthday, the abyss sings happy birthday back”. I had a distracting erection during Philosophy class, so I’m not 100% sure about that one. The point is, you’re not alone if you get the birthday blues; it’s normal, and you’re normal.

Punk ass kid, I could blow out 100 candles and you’re at one.

Here’s what sucks about turning 36…

I’m too old to enlist and fight in World War One. I missed the enlistment date by roughly 106 years. That’s frustrating. I would have liked to suffer in a trench somewhere in Western Europe (as opposed to suffering in my apartment somewhere in Sydney).

Also, I don’t feel 36.

Sometimes, I walk past a group of giggling school kids and assume they’re laughing at me. This experience transports me back to high school, which is strange because I wasn’t bullied. Or maybe my fly is undone. Who knows.

It also doesn’t help to hear about people doing amazing things at ages I haven’t been for a while.

Did you know the youngest Rubik’s cube solver is three years old? Three! I also have a three in my age, but a second number comes quickly after it.

Little moments like that slap me in the face with a perspective-coated glove. Those moments — magnified under the glare of a birthday — make me stop and wonder how much time I’ve wasted or what opportunities I might have missed.

Then I remember I’ve lived (and continue to live) a life full of experiences and value.

Let’s be honest…

• Did that 3-year-old Rubik’s cube child beat leukemia?

• Did that 3-year-old Rubik’s cube child retire at the age of 35?

• Did that 3-year-old Rubik’s cube child fall victim to a sextortion blackmail?

And the answer to those questions is… I don’t know.

It was a Chinese kid, and getting a reply from anyone there was hard. Also, I can’t read their emails because I don’t speak Mandarin. Maybe he does have the same lived experiences as I do. If so, this whole message can go in the bin.

My birthday truth.

I’ll be as real as a wagon wheel. I actually don’t mind getting older (even if it’s a year closer to being beaten to death by my loved ones).

Birthdays are a side effect of being alive, and that hasn’t always been guaranteed, what with my body launching the nukes by switching on leukemia without warning.

I am filled with appreciation, a powerful counterweight to the reminder that each year is passing.

Turning thirty-six means I’ve celebrated sixteen birthdays since my leukemia diagnosis. This means today is kinda like my sixteenth birthday… WHICH MEANS NO ONE HUG ME. I don’t have time for a prolonged, painful erection.

What I’m trying to say is that life is pretty damn cool.

I won’t hit you with the cliche “getting older is a privilege” B.S. because that type of simplified lens isn’t helpful to anyone. When the punches feel like they’re coming from the universe (instead of your family), you don’t have to pretend everything is sunshine and birthday cake.

But if you’ve got special people in your life and a back catalogue of experiences and personal growth, you’re doing amazing — whether it’s your birthday or not.

As a side note, I’ve got some advice if the number of candles on your cake gets you down (which is super humble because it is MY birthday, and everything should be about me).

If you feel like Father Time is spanking you and you’d rather not have a handprint on the ass of your emotional psyche, there’s good news.

There’s a cool study about Subjective Age, which is the extent to which you feel older or younger than your birth certificate says. Science shows that feeling younger than your years is more than a mindset—it leads to a lower risk of depression, greater mental well-being, and decreased risk of death.

You really are only as old as you feel.

Just don’t feel like a nine-year-old and tell me I look like a monkey (and smell like one too) during my Happy Birthday song.

I might be sitting there like a human blob, but I’m not too old to deal out some birthday punches of my own.

With love,

New World Porter

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