Every year, once a year, we get a day. It’s our own day. Our friends shower us with gifts, our family showers us with blessings and our significant others, well they just shower with us. It’s the day that turns our school planner into a rainbow of colors: It’s our birthday.

Some people hate their birthdays. This makes their beau’s task much more challenging. How do you please a sourpuss birthday girl? The cake you baked will make her fat, the alcohol doesn’t mix well with her diet and the silver necklace just doesn’t go with her gold bracelet. So what can you do? There’s really no answer to this one. Fortunately, doomsday comes just once a year.

Then there’s the question of how to please a sulky birthday boy. Again, the job is daunting. But the negative guys are usually too blacked out on their celebratory day to notice anything going on around them. Perhaps the solution is to simply not acknowledge the monumental occasion. Just buy your man drink after drink after drink until he’s ready to sleep away his birthday. That’ll do the trick.

If you’re in a serious relationship, or if your sweetheart’s family lives within a two- to four-hour radius from you, there’s probably going to be a family birthday celebration involved. This means that your new family by association will make the trek to Syracuse, take you and your babe out to a downtown dinner, and try their hardest to keep the night going. First comes grandma’s traditional dessert and then perhaps a few beers with dad. Regardless, everyone must keep in mind that the day still revolves around the birthday girl or guy.

So when pops starts blurting out uncomfortable jokes about you with his little girl, and mom and grandma start fighting over the incorrect amount of sugar in the cake, you are obligated to just keep that party hat strapped on tightly and enjoy the ride.

If you’re not in a serious relationship, birthdays can be a turning point. It can turn ‘just hooking up’ into ‘together,’ ‘together’ into a ‘relationship’ or ‘relationship’ into ‘Facebook official.’

Another important birthday moment is the exchanging of the card. Serious or funny, ‘love’ or ‘xoxo,’ heart or smiley, taping or licking the seal shut, every detail matters on a birthday. Are you the first to write on the Facebook wall? The last? Did you ‘forget’ because you were together all day? How do you behave when you go out with all of your mate’s best friends? Because you have to. It’s a rule. And you have to like it. If the friends are hot, you bite your lip. If they’re annoying, you bite your lip. If they’re both or neither, you bite your lip. Because remember, it’s not your birthday.

Often, birthdays turn into a love fest. We tell the birthday girl how much we love her, even though we haven’t spoken with her since her last birthday. For the single folks out there, we dance our best moves with the random birthday guy at the bar, just because it’s his birthday and he’s wearing a silver tiara. We customize cookie cakes for our birthday co-workers. We sign silly cards for our birthday professors, and we text 12 exclamation points to our birthday friends from lecture. It’s our job to make a birthday person feel special.

Official or unofficial, sexual or not, we are in relationships with many people — and everyone deserves a little extra lovin’ on their birthday. Just don’t go showering everyone with the gift of birthday sex.

Talia Pollock is a junior television, radio and film major. Her column appears every Tuesday and today is her birthday! Send her virtual cards to tpollock@syr.edu.

Published on April 25, 2010 at 12:00 pm