Birthday Party in Cyberspace

All my life I've run into people with the same birthday as mine. Sometimes it's a near miss, for example, the first person I found with a birthday anywhere near mine was JFK, and he wasn't a close friend. I was delighted to learn that he was born the day after I was, but quite a few years before.

This made him another Gemini, and Gemini is the only zodiac sign that likes itself quite so much. I used to lunch at the end of May with two guys I met in the market when I was covering the textile market for a trade newspaper. We were all Geminis and we called it the Gemini lunch, agreeing after a mistake in the early years never to have lunch on an actual birthday. As they left their office one year they announced that they were both Geminis headed for lunch with another Gemini, an astrological buff at a nearby desk asked, "Who's gonna do the listening?"

There are plenty of stories I can tell about, shall we say, great friendships I've had with men whose birthday is very near mine (one I flew to Paris to meet for a weekend after not having seen for 20 years), so I have to believe that, at the very least, Geminis like each other.

Some signs of the zodiac do not share this affinity. Some actually don't like Geminis. But most are not very compatible with people of their own sign and Geminis just naturally do.

Imagine my surprise when in this morning's email there is a notification from the Internet that day after tomorrow, (my birthday) May 28, is Slezak's birthday. Slezak himself, noting in the blog that I said my birthday is coming up, mentioned that his is too. but this site apparently exists just to tell people when somebody's birthday is. I explored to find out exactly what the site is about and Slezak hadn't posted anything on it. Sometimes I see the name when I go to post a comment on a blog, but this appears to be sort of a Facebook with no traffic and no real info. It informed me that Slezak was born on the same day and year as I, even though he tells me he is a year older.

Now that I think about it, once when I was helping Slezak post comments, I used the name Slezak on this very site. It seems to me that through some clerical or computer error, the site could have thought that I myself was named Slezak and taken the birthday information off my account. This would mean that the email was actually sent to inform me of my own birthday! And the Hoboken Kid doesn't know about any of this.

I wonder if the notice will go around the Internet about me too. Most of my friends are well aware of my birthday since I take care to remind them in numerous ways in preceding weeks, usually giving myself a party, and at the very least mentioning the fact about 20 times a day during the month of May.

If there are any Geminis or FOG's (friends-of-Geminis, I just made that up) who share a birthday with us, have a happy one and remember that Geminis just like to have fun. Have a happy one! You too, Hoboken Kid!