The typical birthday dinner 

John Swansburg came down hard in Slate yesterday on a scourge of college life: birthday dinners. Swansburg says they start happening before people get mortgages and after they get degrees, in a time when just going to be a bar seems declasse, but they’re just as prevalent at Georgetown before people are 21. Either way, as Swansburg says, they’re horrible:

Seems like a nice idea, the birthday dinner. It is not. It is a tedious, wretched affair. It is also an extravagantly expensive one. In these wintry economic times, we need to scale back. I hereby propose that the birthday dinner go the way of the $4 cup of coffee, the liar’s mortgage, and the midsize banking institution.

Among his complaints: ending up far from the birthday boy, sandwiched between people you don’t know; wasted food; and an exorbitant bill split equally. For me, the worst part about birthday dinners are people who always want to dress up, even if the dinner is only at Bangkok Bistro. It’d be so much easier and cheaper to stay at home and make spaghetti for everyone instead.

But then, I’m a shut-in. What do you think about birthday dinners?

Photo from Flickr user Michael McDonough used under a Creative Commons license

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 23rd, 2008 at 4:02 pm and is filed under News, Vox Populi. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.