Drive-by Posting: Thank ye, thank ye! :-)
Many thank yous for all of you for all of your kind birthday wishes and happy surprises! Very much appreciated all, and apologies that I can't respond to each individually. :-)
Brings to mind a story, actually, of my 21st birthday, which happened to be on a Friday night. Now, this was during my first year of medical school here at Michigan, back in 1998, which was a fairly, for lack of a better word, monastic time in my life...
I'd worked hard in high school and in college, but at both those times I still was at least around other people on a regular basis when not in class, either family or dorm-mates. Once I moved to Michigan, that running into people no longer largely applied. Between the pace of the classroom years of medical school and the afternoons and evenings I was putting into my research (learning molecular biology from scratch at the beginning of my retooling from engineering to mol. bio, as told here), I spent a lot of time alone. I didn't go out to the bar, I didn't go to the movies, I didn't go to the parties, I pretty much didn't do *anything* or see anyone. I just went to lecture all morning, then went to the histology laboratory to go over slides in the early afternoon, then down two flights to my lab where I would pick up the previous day's sequencing reaction out of the PCR machine, cast a long sequencing gel, get it running, studied on my refrigerator (the lab being crowded initially, for the first two years I used the top of a -20 freezer as my "desk"), unclipped, dried, and set my gel in a film cartridge, went home a little after midnight, and got a happy phone message on my answering machine from my parents wishing me a Happy 21st Birthday.
- Oooohhhh... (sheepish look)
That's right -- I had forgotten my own 21st birthday, and spent that Friday night running sequencing gels and studying histology. So, considering that *I* often forget my *own* birthday in the rush of things, I'd hardly expect anyone else to be 100% reliable remembering my birthday, either! ;-)
It's interesting to me that there are some dates, anniversaries, birthdays, whatnot which I have *never* forgotten, observed like clockwork every year in the years since those dates first took meaning. I think I'll probably end up -- if I am so lucky -- being one of those guys who never, ever forgets his wedding anniversary. I find it interesting that my own birthday doesn't seem to be one of those "never overlook" dates. I'm sure there's some subtle psychological thingie behind that observation. Hm. Maybe I should have taken Intro Psych in undergrad rather than Macro Econ... :-)