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Birthday alert My ace in the hole1 as a human being used to be my capacity for remembering birthdays. I worked at it. Whenever I made a new friend, I made a point of finding out his or her birthday early on, and I would record it in my Filofax
Birthday alert My ace in the hole1 as a human being used to be my capacity for remembering birthdays. I worked at it. Whenever I made a new friend, I made a point of finding out his or her birthday early on, and I would record it in my Filofax calendar. I then took enormous delight in surprising my friend when the day rolled around. It took time and effort; at the end of every 5 year, when I'd bought my new Filofax calendar insert, I spent an entire evening transferring all of my friends' and family's birthdays into the new Filofax—by hand, of course. It was a process that required great concentration. One year, when I must have been tired or distracted, I copied the birthdays from the previous year's calendar into the new one on the same day of the week but on the wrong date, so I was off on every birthday that year until I 10 figured out my mistake. But most of the time I was golden. In fact, my birthday attentiveness was my signature talent. I liked remembering the birthdays not just of my best friends and relatives but also of those secondary friends who you're always happy to see but whom you rarely single out for special notice. They were usually the people who were most surprised that I remembered them. 15 And then it all went to hell. The other day, my husband—who believes every holiday and even the observance of birthdays is a plot devised by greeting-card companies—mentioned during breakfast that it was my cousin's birthday. My cousin? I was flabbergasted—not that it was my cousin's birthday, but that my husband, who doesn't spend a lot of time thinking about birthdays and doesn't really know my cousin very well, would be in possession of such 20 arcane information. I asked him how he happened to know. He shrugged and said that Facebook told him. Or maybe it was Plaxo. No, might have been Linkedln. And, as of this week, it could have even been Google+. I'm glad that my cousin got an extra birthday greeting this year, but what exactly does it mean that a task that used to require effort and some amount of thought now requires just an 25 Internet connection? Is this a good thing, or has it actually devalued the entire tradition of wishing someone a happy