Happy Birthday to......

             Saturday, November 22nd, 2014, was someone's birthday.  I'll call her.....let's say...maybe Vanita.  (Not her real name).

            …So who is Vanita?  She’s the pretty girl who sits at the end of the aisle in the staffroom, and who is very well spoken.  She’s usually got a smile on her face, although often it is a mischievous smile.

           

            Anyway, I digress…the point is, it was Vanita's birthday.

            Several weeks previously, I had agreed to buy Vanita a birthday cake in exchange for an ice coffee that she had bought for me.  I decided to buy her cupcakes instead from Bloom’s Café.

            I was teaching a class in the morning.  (I don’t usually teach on Saturday, but I was doing a cover).  So I bought the cupcakes after lunch, and left them on Vanita’s desk with a birthday card containing a short note: Happy Birthday.  Enjoy.

            The length of the note (or rather the lack thereof) was a subject of criticism.  It was pointed out (with perhaps some justification) that since I regularly write long book reviews on my blog, I should have been capable of writing a much longer birthday note.  And it was proposed that I write a long blog post about Vanita’s birthday as a penance.

            I agreed to it, thinking it was all a joke.  And then received some criticism when the blog post was never written.

           I explained that, after some initial youthful blogging indiscretions, I have over the years made it a policy on this blog to avoid posting about my personal life, which includes birthday messages to friends and co-workers. These days it is blog policy to only to blog about impersonal things like book and movie reviews.  So I don’t write about my friends or co-workers on my blog.  (Or at the very least, I don’t directly reference them.  Although sometimes the careful reader can find indirect references.)

            I was informed that I since I had made the promise, I was locked into the action, whatever the policy of the blog was.  And furthermore, it was pointed out to me that it was unwise to make promises to girls that I had no intention of fulfilling.  

So, here is the message.  Happy birthday Vanita.  Hope it was a good one.