Depending on who you ask, birthdays will mean different things to different folks. It's an easy way to discern someone's general disposition towards life. There are, aswith anything else,two camps existing on opposite poles: people who actively get excited for each one that comes by, demonstrating their liveliness and positivity, and the counter, those with birthday blueswho seem to favor a slightly more melancholy demeanor. Both sides, to a neutral party, can make some sense: the day is ultimately a celebration of you and your presence here in reality, but it also marks your progress towards the inevitable eternal sleep.

My allegiance in the birthday divide is actually to the neutral party. How you detirmine who belongs to the neutral party is simple: when asked about it, we will usually refer to our birthdays as "just another day" (because, in reality, it really is.) This detachment from this day might seem pessimistic, and for some people, that is in part how that view comes to be. Overall, however, my hope is that it can be understood that generally speaking, the neutral party (through our stance on birthdays) can be understood as laid back, "one-day-at-a-time" folks. A birthday is a nice reason to treat yourself to nice things that you might not otherwise, but it stops there for me, and probably most other neutral party members.

What I actually found a lot of fun and interest in was the actual date of my birthday. One day, in the black hole of abstract thought, I began thinking about my birth date, which is June 12th, 1991. The things that struck me as interesting were:

• My birth month and my name have 4 letters and begin/end in the same letters, J and E
• June is the first month of summer, my favorite season
• My last name means August in Spanish, so I was born in the beginning month of Summer and my family name signifies the (informal) ending of it
• Since my brother was born in January, and my sister in December, my siblings and I have birthdays marking the beginning, middle, and end of the year.

The third point has always been my favorite, and the fourth was something that hadn't even occurred to me until I was writing this.

Considering the attention to (and enjoyment of) details surrounding my birth, it was most likely a logical conclusion that I would be somewhat drawn to things like astrology and, as of late, numerology. Really, anything that offers you insight into the kind of person that you are based on specific details of yourself is on my radar right now. Many find that the zodiac and other things of the occult nature shouldn't be depended on, and I do respect that logic. Only to the degree, though, that they should not dictate how you view yourself and your life. Such things should not be the authority that determines your decisions and paths. No one thing should have that role in one's fate.

With that belief, I will occasionally go through descriptions of Gemini's, and wonder what my Celtic sign is and what moon I was born under. Little things like that might not say all that much about me or my future. Chances are good that they have an almost zero percent chance of having any influence to me. Admittingly, I will see things in those descriptions that I do see in myself. Such descriptions of character and personalities are usually hit or miss, due to their general statements, but sometimes they can really speak about who you are. Still, I can’t say I have all that much faith in them. According to the Chinese Zodiac, everyone born in the same year should generally have the same character traits, and definitely does not seem to be the case.

Bottom line, it's plausible that those are just guidelines to a general predisposition that has been catalouged by people in the past, based on the time of your birth. While they aren't ironclad, the idea of using details around your birth has its roots and shouldn't be shunned. Even if my own birth facts don't concretely say anything about my character or destiny, they still managed to have ties to key things about myself, somehow. It should make some sense that the very day you woke up in this world should say something of significanceabout you as a whole, if only a little.