We gauge our lives by years.

I have a birthday tomorrow, and I have to admit I’ve never entirely understood celebrating birthdays. Maybe at one point they made sense, but all they make me feel now is nostalgic for the past, the way things used to be when birthdays were when I invited literally everyone from my grade school class, (even the kids I never talked to), and wore a party dress with a big bow and ate cake with pastel icing on it and played silly games like pin the tail on the donkey, and duck duck goose and that one where you try to drop as many clothes pins into a small jar as possible (personal record: 8).

And everyone brought a present. That’s when presents weren’t clothes but things you really needed – you know, toys. Birthdays were the only time during the year except Christmas where you could stock up on the essentials: Barbies, more Rubik’s cubes you swore you’d one day figure out, board games, fake food for your thriving four star restaurant in the basement, and the latest Disney movie on VHS to add to your collection.

Now it’s just a day where I can see how much everything has changed, (without cake or Barbie’s). A day that reminds me of all the things I haven’t done that I said I’d do by now. Birthday’s for grown-ups is really just one big kick in the face, a whole day dedicated to you to remind you just how much time you’ve actually been wasting.

I know that sounds cynical, but I’m a realist, and any good realist will tell you that birthday’s are complete crap. They’re the holiday equivalent of New Years. Why are we celebrating the passage of time? Shouldn’t we be sad to see it come and go? Another day? Another year? Another 365 days that you hardly feel were your own life at all?

And yet they’ve happened to you regardless. We gauge our lives by years but it seems to me we should gauge them by hours and minutes. That’s when the real stuff happens, the real dirt of life, the real messiness, the real living. I know we can’t celebrate ourselves every second of every day, but we should remember more that it’s not just our age that we should weigh ourselves by, rather, just how we get through every day.

Birthdays aren’t what they used to be because life isn’t the way it used to be either. It’s messy and real and fragile and it’s in those seconds you never think about that it happens. It comes at you fast, before you even have a chance to blow out the candles and wish that it didn’t.