Sorry for the extreme close-up but I had to crop this picture. When I got the girls to agree to take it with me I don’t think using it for the Sunday Paper was part of the deal.

(Sunday Paper, Year VII, Issue 28)

Over the years I have built something of a reputation as someone who goes a little nuts over his birthday.

I don’t know exactly when that started.

I don’t think it’s been my whole life.

If I had to guess, I’d say it probably started when I was older.

Here’s what I think happened - when I was little, the day was always about me.

When I got older, it became just a regular day, and I missed when it was about me.

So I started to make it about me again to an almost ridiculous extent.

This year, though, was different.

My birthday was on Thursday.

I tell you this because you might not know that. I don’t have it on Facebook. There are different reasons for this which I’ve written about at different times in different places but that’s not the point here. That’s just to make clear today is not my birthday and why you might not have known that it already happened.

I don’t mind if you didn’t know. Because I’ve decided it’s time to stop making a big deal out of my birthday.

I used to get a kick out of riling the girls up and making it a really special day and it was always a lot of fun when they were little to turn the house into a bunch of little birthday maniacs.

But I don’t know that I was setting the best birthday example.

And there have been some changes over the years. Kathy and I have 6 nieces and nephews - 5 of them have birthdays in July.

it’s time to leave the birthday craziness to them.

This year, I just wanted to spend the day with the girls. They humored me and we went to the Concord Museum, a nice little history museum in the town of Concord that had been renovated a few years ago and I hadn’t been there since they had it re-done.

It was a really nice way to spend part of the day.

Then we went out to dinner and had some ice cream.

I will say that in the past even if I didn’t go outwardly crazy about my birthday, I would still get disappointed if others weren't worked up about it too. It was a weird disappointment, and I kind of accidentally let a lot of those weird kinds of disappointments into my life.

I’m trying to eliminate them…and making my birthday low-key with very little room for disappointment seems like a good opportunity to do that.

Instead it’s an opportunity to set an expectation that I can meet fully without leaving room for disappointment.

This year we did exactly that.

What I’ve Been Enjoying

“Back To Black” - Amy Winehouse
“Aquemini” - Outkast
“Fine Line” - Harry Styles
The Dark Knight Rises
Shaun of the Dead
Se7en
Hancock

A quick note on two of this week’s selections. First of all, I thought it might be funny to watch Seven (Se7en, I guess) on 7/7. I don’t usually go for the gruesome, but it actually wasn’t as bad as I expected. Maybe it helped that I already had a general idea of how it ended.

The other movie I want to comment on is Hancock. I remembered hearing two things when it came out - one was that it had a twist. So I’ve always been curious what that twist was. But I didn’t make a huge effort to see it because of the second thing I had always heard about it - that it was not very good. It only took me 15 years, but I did finally make the effort. As for the first thing, I saw the twist coming once I started watching….which means maybe the second thing is also true?

Notes

*A couple of fun personal things happening in July. I won’t tell you about it now but I will tell you about it over the next couple of weeks, so do come back please.

*On topic with this week’s post: Part of the July fun is that I think I’ll have an opportunity to take a fun birthday picture (for my 44th birthday). Stay tuned for that.

*You might be able to keep tabs on things in real time via social media. Those buttons are below.