This is from 2024 but I’m looking forward to the birthday message from my watch this year.

You would think I would have plenty to write about for my birthday, but I was kind of struggling with what to write about today.

I’m working today. That’s been rare in the past couple of decades, working on my birthday. Or at least not working only on my terms.

Between teaching and working on my own schedule, the last time I worked on my birthday was probably back in 2003?

Except for 2018. And I’m sure this birthday will be better than that one.

In that instance, the writing job I was doing for an organization was cut, so at the end of the school year in June I was going to be done, except they liked me and wanted to keep me, and they had a temporary opening for the director of external programs and would I like to do that while they found a permanent replacement, so I figured why not.

Except the guy before me left nothing and was totally checked out before leaving and on July 5th I was told a camp was moving in on July 7th, and I would need to be there for it and then I got yelled at by parents on my birthday because it was a mess. They had every right to be upset, but I think it was crappy that the person I reported to made me go in that day instead of taking the heat herself.

They lucked out though when they found the permanent guy - he was great and I was ready to get the heck out of there. Maybe I should send him a note. I liked him.

But I digress.

I used to make a huge deal out of my birthday but I’ve tried to tone that down more recently. I don’t know why I used to do that - maybe I just wanted to know people were thinking about me? That’s kind of why I don’t put my birthday on Facebook - I want people to genuinely know it’s my birthday, not be reminded by social media.

I’ve also mentioned there are a lot of kids now who have birthdays around mine and I don't feel good about stealing their thunder.

So I don’t know how today will unfold.

There are a few things I do every year on my birthday:

My mom does a fun thing where she plays my birth date in the New York City lottery and I get to look at those results for about a week and I enjoy that.

I’ll watch baseball, of course. Growing up, I used to be able to take a few friends to a Mets game on my birthday - we had a little cake at home and then went to Shea Stadium. That’s a nice memory. For my 40th Kathy organized a bunch of family and friends at a game at Citi Field - that was a good time. The Mets don’t play on my birthday this year, but there’ll be some game I’ll pop on.

Actually, a while back we talked about going to the Red Sox game and I changed my mind about that. (We’ll go to another game soon. I’ll write about it.)

But I figured I’d rather be at home with family. We’re actually going out to dinner, which will be nice.

And truthfully, that’s kind of all I need on my birthday these days.