I just got back from some festivities for my friend Conci’s birthday, which were good fun, but I realized that it was at least the sixth birthday party I’ve been to in a week.
The question arises: Why are there so many damn people born in September? The fact that it’s nine months after January spawns most of the answers I’ve heard.
There is the “snowstorm” theory, that if people are snowed in with nothing else to do, they’ll simply go produce some offspring. Though from my own experience, I’ve noted that extended periods in enclosed spaces tends to produce more animosity than cameraderie (a.k.a. less fucking, more fighting).
There’s also always the “Happy New Year” theory, wherein the parents get together on a New Year’s vacation, although that really can only possibly account for people born up until about September fifteenth. After that, it gets to be a bit more sketchy.
I think maybe we have Martin Luther King, Jr. to thank. Before you send me vitriolic emails, hear me out:
His birthday is in the middle of January and it has been a holiday since before the time the people in my age group were concieved, and people weren’t then and aren’t now actually doing anything socially meaningful to mark the day, they’re going on 3-day weekends with their significant other.
He certainly was a peace-love-general happiness type of guy, and I think he’d get a kick out of the idea that 9 months following the holiday that honors him, there’s a spike in the birth rate.
He’d obviously be dissapointed that people were fucking instead of helping their fellow man, but I think he’d find this to be at least a moderately decent substitute.
Then again, it could just be the group of people I know having birthdays in a cluster, and I could be getting an angry letter from King’s heirs any day now.