Seems like everyone’s celebrating birthdays lately. Why fete the aging process (to be emo in only the second sentence)? I guess everyone loves to party, and at some point people said, OK, birthdays are a good time to do that. I wonder sometimes why it’s not alright to party on Arbor Day, the best day of the year, but I don’t worry too much about it and go back to my Arbor Day revelry. It’s pretty much the biggest time of the year for me and a much-needed counterpoint to the solemn pagan rites I practice at the change of each season. (None of the above was true. [But I am now a vegetarian.])

Anyway, birthdays are a good excuse to party—I went to a half-birthday party earlier this month and a friend’s celebrating being 21 and three-quarters next week. But when you get to college, who needs an excuse? It’s Tuesday? Have a party! Midterms over? Time to throw down! GUSA fails again? Get stupid! Despite our party-heartiness, birthdays are a bigger deal now than they were in pre-adolescence. Maybe because you have all your friends close at hand and readily available alcohol… or maybe it’s something else entirely!

I have a summer birthday, which means I miss out on celebrating at Georgetown. My birthdays are generally low-key, which is fine with me. After all, I don’t need an excuse to get blotto. I’ve been privy to many friends’ birthday parties, though, and they’ve run the gamut from small-group dinners to Village B blowouts. The one thing we all have in common is the notion that our birthdays are worth celebrating, even if that means different things to different people.

When you’re a little kid, your parents throw you parties. Maybe they hire a clown, which is usually a bad idea. Maybe they’ll rent out the roller rink for some old-timey hijinks. Or maybe they hand you and your friends waterguns and encourage you to “have fun.” Funny that, even when our parents aren’t around to do these things, we take party matters into our own party hands.

In college, a dim awareness that these are supposedly the best years of one’s life is juxtaposed with an acute awareness that life is relatively unspectacular. The willful un-responsibility we all practice takes on a certain urgency against the inevitability of graduation and the real world. And we’re torn, as all young people are, between wanting to enjoy being young and wanting to just be done with it. I think birthday parties are a legitimate celebration of being older and wiser, as much as they are an excuse to get sloppy. Even if the birthday in question isn’t twenty-one.