Elemental Birthday Quotes

I had loved him since the moment he’d taken the pudding from me. When my father had announced on Dez’s eighteenth birthday that he supported a match between us, I’d never been happier than I was in that moment. I was young. And stupid. When Dez had disappeared the very next day, I experienced a heartache that I thought would swallow me whole and never spit me out. He’d been more than a crush. He had been my best friend, my confidant and my world.

We remember Columbine as a pair of outcast Goths from the Trench Coat Mafia snapping and tearing through their high school hunting down jocks to settle a long-running feud. Almost none of that happened. No Goths, no outcasts, nobody snapping. No targets, no feud, and no Trench Coat Mafia. Most of those elements existed at Columbine—which is what gave them such currency. They just had nothing to do with the murders. The lesser myths are equally unsupported: no connection to Marilyn Manson, Hitler’s birthday, minorities, or Christians.

Sometimes the most important and powerful element is an absence, a lack, a burnished space in your mind that glows and aches as you try to fill it.

As far as I could remember, birthdays had always been filled with love, happiness and joy. They were a time when the whole family would gather in either gigantic or tiny congregations to celebrate the anniversary of a loved one’s birth. They were a time to rejoice in the notion that a person had grown one year older (if they wanted to be reminded that is). Finally, birthdays were a time of laughter, when presents would be shared, songs sung and past memories revisited. Adele Rose, Awakening.

After Constantine engineered the merger of Christ worshipers with sun worshipers in the fourth century, the creeds solidified and finalized the view of faith we hold today. Not only was this politically expedient, but it gave the church many elements of Mithraism that survive to this day. Christ is depicted in early paintings as the Sun (with rays bursting from his head), Sun-Day is the day of rest, and Christmas was moved from January 6 (still the date for Eastern Orthodox churches) to December 25, the birthday of Mithra. The ornaments of Christian orthodoxy today are nearly identical to those of the Mithraic version: miters, wafers, water baptism, altar, and doxology. Mithra was a traveling teacher with twelve companions who was called the “good shepherd,” “the way, the truth, and the life,” and “redeemer,” “savior,” and “messiah.” He was buried in a tomb, and after three days he rose again. His resurrection was celebrated every year.

You could be Aryan Nations but not a Skinhead, depending on whether or not you bought into Christian Identity theology. White Supremacists were more academic, publishing treatises; Skinheads were more violent, preferring to teach a lesson with their fists. White Separatists were the guys buying land in North Dakota and trying to divide the country so that anyone nonwhite would be kicked over the perimeter they created. Neo-Nazis were a cross between Aryan Nations and the Aryan Brotherhood in prisons—if there was a violent street gang criminal element to the Movement, they were it. There were Odinists and Creationists and disciples of the World Church of the Creator. But in spite of the ideology that split us into factions, we’d all come together one day of the year to celebrate: April 20, the birthday of Adolf Hitler.

How could they have forgotten the importance of today’s date? My brain screamed at me as, with shaking fingers, I climbed the stairs to the bus, before making my way to the back, out of sight. My birthday, like the norm, happens on the same date every year. Therefore, the confused part of my brain argued, how could they have all simply forgotten this fact and acted so “normal” when I entered the kitchen this morning? They may have been abducted by aliens in the night? This was a voice from the incomprehensible area of my mind. Consequently, their behaviour would make complete sense then! Furthermore, answered another voice from the same ridiculous compartment, they could’ve simply gone to bed last night fine and then awoken the next morning with amnesia? Sometimes, these things happen unexpectedly. Adele Rose, Awakening.

THE BEGINNING THERE WERE many of us, and we were all different. You could be Aryan Nations but not a Skinhead, depending on whether or not you bought into Christian Identity theology. White Supremacists were more academic, publishing treatises; Skinheads were more violent, preferring to teach a lesson with their fists. White Separatists were the guys buying land in North Dakota and trying to divide the country so that anyone nonwhite would be kicked over the perimeter they created. Neo-Nazis were a cross between Aryan Nations and the Aryan Brotherhood in prisons—if there was a violent street gang criminal element to the Movement, they were it. There were Odinists and Creationists and disciples of the World Church of the Creator. But in spite of the ideology that split us into factions, we’d all come together one day of the year to celebrate: April 20, the birthday of Adolf Hitler

a type of radiation emitted by the Sun, ultraviolet (UVR), is believed to cause genetic changes in the developing baby that may have a shaping effect on their life and personality.

Winter-born children may end up being bigger and more academically inclined than those born in summer.

A lit candle contains all five elements: fire, earth, air, water, and spirit. The flame itself is fire, the base of the candle that holds it steady is earth, the oxygen that sustains it is air, the wax that pools is water, and when you infuse your energy into the candle, you are spirit. When you perform candle magic, you are invoking the elements and merging them with your intention.

Because memory is reconstructive, it is subject to confabulation—confusing an event that happened to someone else with one that happened to you or coming to believe that you remember something that never happened. In reconstructing a memory, people draw on many sources. When you remember your fifth birthday party, you may have a direct recollection of your younger brother putting his finger in the cake and spoiling it for you, but you will also incorporate information that you got later from family stories, photographs, home videos, and birthday parties you’ve seen on television. You weave all these elements together into one integrated account. If someone hypnotizes you and regresses you to your fifth birthday party, you’ll tell a lively story about it that will feel terribly real to you, but it will include many of those party details that never actually happened. After a while, you won’t be able to distinguish your actual memory from subsequent information that crept in from elsewhere. That phenomenon is called “source confusion,” otherwise known as the “where did I hear that?” problem.

Surely, if my parents and older brother were awake now, that would mean that they would have remembered such an important date and, as soon as they saw me, congratulate me on living another year? Adele Rose, Awakening.

You know when my birthday is too, don’t you?” “Yes.” They continued down the dark streets. “Childhood pet?” He cleared his throat in what she guessed was a purely habitual gesture. “I’ve never understood the appeal of Chihuahuas, to be honest.

Large-scale elements signal that something different and important is happening in the life of a community. Giant balloons, numbers (for a birthday party), hearts (for Valentine’s Day), baby blocks (for a shower), and other big things stand out as different from everyday décor.

No matter how you civilised it, the body remained somewhat wild, or savage, or natural. It had to keep up its animal functions, or die. It could never be fully tamed, fully controlled. Even plants, Luis learned from listening to Hsing’s father, however manipulated to serve their symbiotic functions, were not totally predictable or obedient; and the bacteria populations came up constantly with “wild” breeds, possibly dangerous mutations. The only things that could be perfectly controlled were inanimate, the matter of the world, the elements and compounds, solid, liquid, or gas, and the artifacts made from them. What about the controller, the civiliser itself, the mind? Was it civilised? Did it control itself?

Because it was the fate of the damned to run of course, not jog, run, their piss on fire and their shit molten, boiling sperm and their ovaries frying; what they were permitted of body sprinting at full throttle, wounded gallop, burning not fat—fat sizzled off in the first seconds, bubbled like bacon and disappeared, evaporate as steam, though the weight was still there, still with you, its frictive drag subversive as a tear in a kite and not even muscle, which blazed like wick, but the organs themselves, the liver scorching and the heart and brains at flash point, combusting the chemistries, the irons and phosphates, the atoms and elements, conflagrating vitamin, essence, soul, yet somehow everything still within the limits if not of endurance then of existence. Damnation strictly physical, nothing personal, Hell’s lawless marathon removed from character. ‘Sure,’ someone had said, ‘we hit the Wall with every step. It’s all Wall down here. It’s wall-to-wall Wall. What, did you think Hell would be like some old-time baker’s oven? That all you had to do was lie down on a pan like dough, the insignificant heat bringing you out, fluffing you up like bread or oatmeal cookies? You think we’re birthday cake? We’re fucking stars. Damnation is hard work, eternity lousy hours.

It’s an immortal soulmate ring,” he said. “Every male immortal forges one on his thirteenth birthday. This one is mine. The ring I crafted to one day give to my soulmate.” “To me,” I said, breathless. “Yes.