Football Counter-Programming 2016--Week 3

Credit: youthservicesslc.files.wordpress.com

Have I talked about the concept of "birthday time" yet on the blog?

I seem to remember tweeting a screen shot illustrating the idea once, but I don't know if I actually explained what it meant.

Can you guess?

It's pretty simple really . . . you convert what month and day you were born into corresponding hours and minutes. That is your "birthday time." For example, I was born on October 17. So, my birthday time is 10:17.

What is the value of this fact? (Or maybe it should be called a concept since it isn't any sort of recognized thing . . . but merely a quirk that I have--one that I would like to turn into a more recognized thing.)

Andbutso . . . the value of knowing this? Truly there isn't much--obviously, or I guess more people would do something with it and there would be lines of greeting cards centered around it or some other relevant commercialization of it.

No, it's just something I started doing mentally in my head and I taught my children to pay attention to it. For no other reason that it makes me momentarily happy to look at a clock when it randomly indicated 10:17 and think silently to myself "Hey, it's birthday time."

Maybe that makes me monstrously self-centered? Or maybe it just makes garden variety narcissistic. Or maybe it means nothing at all. But I know that I like it when I hear my children from across the room acknowledge "Birthday Time!" when the happen to notice it on the clock. Not that they always do so . . . but it makes my heart beat a bit whenever it does happen.

We all want to make a difference in some way, I guess. To prove that we existed and that our lives were not just a flash in a long string of others, with no lasting consequence. Maybe this is mine?

So . . . anyway . . . maybe twenty years from now when you feel obligated to send Hallmark Greeting Cards twice-daily text messages to people to celebrate their Birthday Time, you can thank me for the obligation.

And remember--no one cares if your college's field goal kicker great up in Melbourne and didn't know who David Hasselhoff was until last year. He still can't reliably hit a 40 yard field goal when the wind is blowing left-to-right.