It’s my 27th birthday. I like the number 27: Two primes, the product of a square and its root (3 and 9). I don’t especially like the age 27, though. You might consider it just over the hill of youth (unless you’re Bush, for whom youth reached well into his 30s), but it’s also just under the milestone of 30, which is what I’m really sort of stretching for. The average age of my friends is probably 40 or 45, and I’m one of the rosy-cheeked babies. I feel guilty at times when my friends have cause to reflect on my age; maybe they feel weird for having such a young friend, like a guy my age dating a high school girl (except that such a guy apparently doesn’t feel so bad about it). 28 will be better, I think. At 27, I’m still firmly entrenched in the 20s, but at 28, I’ll be mounting the springboard into the 30s.

Some people who share my birthday include the following:

• Laura Dern
• George Stephanopoulos
• Greg Norman
• Robert Wagner
• Lon Chaney Jr.
• Bertolt Brecht
• Jimmy Durante

None of these people excite me a great deal. I doubt I excite them either.

Once at a summer program I attended, I met a guy who not only had the same birthday as me but also had the same name spelled the same way (not all that common). We were pretty much opposites in terms of personality, though. He was outgoing and rambunctious, while I was shy and reserved. I always rather liked sharing a name with the movie about a kid robot who saved the world. His name was an acronym for Data Analyzing Robot Youth Lifeform. Pretty vapid from a technical point of view, but I sure dug it when I was 9.

I believe I’ll be the same age when my pending child is born as my dad was when his first child (my sister) was born.

Birthdays are always a little disappointing to me nowadays. Holidays in general are, probably because holidays tend to focus on kids. Compared to the incomparable excitement I felt in anticipation of birthdays and other holidays as a kid, these celebrations stand out less vibrantly now that I’m all grown up. It’s not so much the presents and the to-do I miss (as I sometimes find these things awkward to accept) as it is the fact of the excitement. As my child grows up, I imagine some of this excitement will return and that I’ll be able to experience it vicariously through her.