Thursday, April 02, 2020

Worst Birthdays, Ranked

My birthday.

Historically, it's often been bad. Roll a one with a d20 bad.

It's Saturday (hey, a Coronavirus birthday!), and I can't go anywhere, or do anything, so here comes another one. Not important in the slightest, in the context of what everyone is suffering through, but darkly comic.

So I thought about my birthdays over the last twenty years and made a top-three list of the absolute worst. There were some tough decisions to be made.

#3 April 4, 2001: The Bataan Death March (Seaworld Edition)
Five days after arthroscopic knee surgery, we went to SeaWorld in San Antonio. It was blistering hot, in the 90s, and none of the drink stations were open. All around us, the smell of fresh asphalt, almost dizzying. I staggered on one leg, lost five pounds, wished it would end.

#2 April 4, 2010: Jesus Killed My Birthday
Ah, the Easter birthday. Absolutely, nothing, NOTHING was open, much to my astonishment. Lunch? Nope. A little self-gifting at Fry's? Nope. I guess I know how Jesus feels, because nothing is open on his birthday, either. If you're expecting this, it's manageable (I just move  my birthday to Saturday now, if I need to), but I had absolutely no idea the first time it happened. I kept driving to the next place, thinking that surely IT would be open, but no. Nothing.

#1 April 4, 2018: The Boston Massacre
We went to Boston for Spring Break last year so that Eli could get fitted for a custom goalie helmet, and it was also a good chance for him to see Harvard. There's nothing like temperatures in the high 30s and steady rain to rejuvenate your enthusiasm for several days running. Also, half of Boston's roads were getting worked on, so you couldn't get to or from anywhere. At the end of the trip, I flew back home, while Eli 16.7 and Gloria flew out to see more colleges. On my birthday, the flight into Detroit was five hours late arriving (coming in after midnight), I missed the flight to Grand Rapids, and wound up in an airport hotel getting four hours of sleep before waking up to make a 7 a.m. flight. Happy Birthday. Yay.

Now the really excellent news is that my birthday has such a low bar that as long as I don't actually have (or catch) Coronavirus, it won't even come close to cracking the top 3.

I do have a friend that was born on 9/11. That's an even tougher dice roll.

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