Prior Birthday Quotes

I invited a few people to help celebrate your birthday," Cameron said sheepishly. She threw up her hands. "Surprise." "We sort of come with the package," Collin explained. "Think of it as a collective gift from all of us to you: five bona fide annoying and overly intrusive new best friends." "It's the gift that keeps on giving," Wilkins said. Jack grinned. "I'm touched. Really. And since it appears I'm going to be moving in, let me be the first to say that all of you are always welcome at my and Cameron's house. Subject to a minimum of forty-eight hours prior notification.

Kristen and I always have a lot to celebrate at the end of June. First there’s Father’s Day, followed by our wedding anniversary and my birthday. But prior to the Best Practices this two-week season of parties didn’t inspire much of a celebratory mood. It always felt strange celebrating Father’s Day, given that my parenting skills had been something of a disappointment for the first three years, and the tears that Kristen had shed on our third wedding anniversary spoke rather poignantly to the fact that our marriage hadn’t been much to celebrate, either. That left my birthday, a day that was all about toasting the birth of the very person who had made Kristen’s life miserable.

proper legal structure. The best structure is that of the Mondragon companies, which do not allow workers to own a tradable share of equity. Instead, in addition to their wages they each have an internal capital account the value of which depends on the business’s performance and on the number of hours the member works. A new member has to pay a large entrance fee, most of which is credited to his internal account. He receives interest at the end of every fiscal year, but he cannot withdraw the annually accumulating principal from his account until retirement. Almost all profits are divided between these individual accounts and a collective account that helps ensure the company’s survival. No buying or selling of shares takes place in this scheme, so it’s difficult for the firm to lose its worker-controlled status. Not until 1982, however, did the internal-capital-accounts legal structure exist in the United States (and then only in Massachusetts); prior to that, worker cooperatives had to make convoluted use of other categories, which sometimes made them vulnerable to degeneration.113 In any case, the survival rates of contemporary cooperatives put the lie to traditional theories of cooperatives’ unsustainability, for they appear to have higher rates of survival than conventional firms. During the 1970s and early 1980s, the death rate for co-ops in France (due either to dissolution or to conversion into a capitalist firm) was 6.9 percent; the comparable rate for capitalist competitors was 10 percent. A study in 1989 found much higher failure rates for capitalist companies than cooperatives in North America.114 A study conducted by Quebec’s Ministry of Industry and Commerce in 1999 concluded that “Co-op startups are twice as likely to celebrate their 10th birthday as conventionally owned private businesses.”115 A later study by the same organization found that “More than 6 out of 10 cooperatives survive more than five years, as compared to almost 4 businesses out of 10 for the private sector in Québec and in Canada in general. More than 4 out of 10 cooperatives survive more than 10 years, compared to 2 businesses out of 10 for the private sector.”116

The Gestapo hanged the final group of 28 July 20th “traitors” on April 20th, 1945 as a birthday present to the Fuhrer. Many of the victims made no effort to either kill themselves or escape prior to their arrest, preferring to await the Gestapo with “dignity” and thus express their belief they were neither criminals nor traitors but brave German officers doing their duty and accepting the consequences of failure. Peter Yorck von Wartenburg wrote to his wife during the trials, “I, too, am dying for my country, and even if it seems to all appearances a very inglorious and disgraceful death, I shall hold up my head and I only hope that you will not believe this to be from pride or delusion. We wished to light the torch of life and now we stand in a sea of flames.” (Thomsett, 1997, 236).

After contracting Lyme disease and operating at ~10% capacity for 9 months in 2014, I made health #1. Prior to Lyme, I’d worked out and eaten well, but when push came to shove, “health #1” was negotiable. Now, it’s literally #1. What does this mean? If I sleep poorly and have an early morning meeting, I’ll cancel the meeting last-minute if needed and catch up on sleep. If I’ve missed a workout and have a conference call coming up in 30 minutes? Same. Late-night birthday party with a close friend? Not unless I can sleep in the next morning. In practice, strictly making health #1 has real social and business ramifications. That’s a price I’ve realized I MUST be fine with paying, or I will lose weeks or months to sickness and fatigue. Making health #1 50% of the time doesn’t work. It’s absolutely all-or-nothing. If it’s #1 50% of the time, you’ll compromise precisely when it’s most important not to. The artificial urgency common to startups makes mental and physical health a rarity. I’m tired of unwarranted last-minute “hurry up and sign” emergencies and related fire drills. It’s a culture of cortisol.

Keep a list of birthdays, marriage and work anniversaries and other special dates. Provide recognition to your people on each of these dates. Mark your calendar prior to the actual date so you have time to prepare for it.

Kristen and I always have a lot to celebrate at the end of June. First there’s Father’s Day, followed by our wedding anniversary and my birthday. But prior to the Best Practices this two-week season of parties didn’t inspire much of a celebratory mood. It always felt strange celebrating Father’s Day, given that my parenting skills had been something of a disappointment for the first three years, and the tears that Kristen had shed on our third wedding anniversary spoke rather poignantly to the fact that our marriage hadn’t been much to celebrate, either. That left my birthday, a day that was all about toasting the birth of the very person who had made Kristen’s life miserable. But after fifteen months of hard work and soul-searching, Kristen and I were finally able to look forward to this season with real anticipation. We were communicating again, and I was beginning to hit my stride as a father and as a husband. I was folding laundry, Kristen was taking her first uninterrupted showers in years, and when America’s Next Top Model wasn’t on during its regularly scheduled hour, I stayed cool as a cucumber. And that gave us plenty of reason to break out the streamers and party hats. Heck, we could have made a layer cake. In light of all this, I decided that June would be the best time to embark on my most ambitious Best Practice yet: being fun.

There is no end to it, no way to measure it. Consciousness is like the cosmos multiplied by the number of people alive in the world (assuming that consciousness dies when we do, and it may not) because each of our minds is a cosmos of its own: unknowable, even to ourselves. Hence the instant appeal of Mandala’s Own Your Unconscious. Who could resist the chance to revisit our memories, the majority of which we’d forgotten so completely that they seemed to belong to someone else? And having done that, who could resist gaining access to the Collective Consciousness for the small price of making our own anonymously searchable? We all went for it on our twenty-first birthday, Mandala’s age of consent, just as prior tech generations went for music sharing and DNA analysis, never fully reckoning, in our excitement over our revelatory new freedom, with what we surrendered by sharing the entirety of our perceptions to the Internet—and thereby to counters, like me. Strict rules govern the use of gray grabs by data gatherers, but there are occasions when I’m obliged, in my professional capacity, to search the psyches of strangers. It’s an eerie sensation

Ebenezer Fox returned to Boston in May of 1783, only twenty years old but a seasoned adventurer. During his time at sea he had survived several battles, endured the hatch of the Jersey, and escaped from both the British and the French. His life had been endangered on numerous occasions, he had been wounded in the encounter on Jamaica, and he had lost part of his hearing. At the end of it all he received $80, his share of the Flora’s plunder. By prior agreement his master was to receive half of this, but upon Ebenezer’s return Mr. Bosson demanded it all. Legally, that was his right. Despite more than three years of harrowing escapades and service to his country, young Ebenezer Fox was still apprenticed until his twenty-first birthday to a Boston barber who never went to war.

Offline, there are forms of relief built into this process. Audiences change over—the performance you stage at a job interview is different from the one you stage at a restaurant later for a friend’s birthday, which is different from the one you stage for a partner at home. At home, you might feel as if you could stop performing altogether; within Goffman’s dramaturgical framework, you might feel as if you had made it backstage. Goffman observed that we need both an audience to witness our performances as well as a backstage area where we can relax, often in the company of “teammates” who had been performing alongside us. Think of coworkers at the bar after they’ve delivered a big sales pitch, or a bride and groom in their hotel room after the wedding reception: everyone may still be performing, but they feel at ease, unguarded, alone. Ideally, the outside audience has believed the prior performance.

my parents, Tully and Belinda Bloom. I haven’t seen them since police locked me up in juvenile detention as a tenth grader for helping myself to a pair of iPhones at the local Best Buy. I did it at their urging, palming items that could be pawned off to pay for their financial shortfalls. On parole themselves for a variety of offenses and fearful of what a “corrupting the morals of a minor” conviction might mean to their personal liberties, they swore to the court they had no prior knowledge of what I was doing, and I, too naive for my own good, said nothing to contradict their lies. It was my third offense in six months, a tipping point that landed me a three-month juvenile detention stint. Although I didn’t know it at the time, my parents’ own legal issues would make it unfeasible for me to be released back into their custody when I completed my initial sentence. So three months became six months. Which became a year. Which was extended until I reached my eighteenth birthday.

By 1920, he was living back home with his parents while pursuing a degree at Michigan State Agricultural College.5 Specializing in chicken breeding, he proved to be so proficient that, immediately after his graduation, he received a summer school appointment as “instructor in poultry husbandry for federal students”—young veterans attending college with governmental aid.6 In addition to his academic work, the religiously committed Huyck was active in the Student Volunteer Movement, a campaign begun in 1886 to enlist college students for missionary work abroad with the ultimate goal of bringing about (as its watchword put it) “the evangelization of the world in this generation.”7 In April 1922, just prior to his graduation from Michigan State Agricultural College and three months shy of his twenty-eighth birthday, Emory accepted the position of superintendent of the Bath Consolidated School at an annual salary of $2,300. Eight months later, two days after Christmas, Emory married Ethel Newcomb of Pierson, Michigan, six years his senior; she would also join the faculty at the newly built school, teaching “vocal music” and second grade.8