Can We Talk About 50 Claps? And Singing Happy Birthday?

To be clear, this is a rant. I’ve always sort of hated singing Happy Birthday and having it sung to me. I can’t identify specifically why, but it’s like nails on a chalkboard. It’s the 30 seconds of my own birthday I’d vote off the birthday island every year. This past year, the only person I allowed to sing to me was my Dad, and that is the only person I enjoy hearing it from.

Dad is almost 80 and his dementia is rapidly worsening. As I sat alone by a fire pit in Seattle and watched the sunrise on my birthday, I wondered if he would remember. Sure enough, on EDT, he called right around 7am (it used to be around 5–6am, so age gave me a little sleeping in time). The imperative part is that he remembered at all. He called and sang his own abbreviated Happy Birthday as I smiled and choked back tears.

Since then, things with Dad have declined rapidly and significantly. I mentioned in a response earlier about writing a book. I haven’t developed an entire plot for just one book yet, though I have ideas. It’s probably more than one book, and perhaps Dad deserves a book just about him, but he will make it into a book regardless. His story is worth being told and read. He is “Norm” from Cheers. The man does not know a stranger.

Above all: He is my person. He is the reason I am only a partial train wreck and not a full on catastrophic loss as a human. Watching him slide away faster than I am able to go home and spend time with him is decidedly the hardest loss I’ve faced. And I have faced an awful lot of losses for my age, but I digress.

Can we talk about the tradition of singing happy birthday? It makes me uncomfortable. The song itself. The part where everyone calls the birthday person a different name. The part where everyone sounds like a flock of geese dying. I’d be lying if I said there weren’t a few times I didn’t just mouth the words or sing very softly. I cannot sign, period. I also don’t like being on the receiving end. It’s only about 30 seconds long but it makes those seconds feel like an eternity. Everyone directing their attention at you. I’m almost 43. What if I miss a candle? I’m embarrassed just thinking about it.

While we are on the subject of awkward things, can someone tell kindly tell me the history or Medium courtesy behind “50 claps”? Now I am also embarrassed for when I first started reading and only gave one clap, like some weird outcast vote Scrooge. Is this an unwritten rule? I’ve obviously been on, low brow social media forums too long (not to suggest that Medium is a social media platform, it’s just a new forum for me), unlike places where I wish I could downvote idiots more than once. Medium has been a reprieve from the otherwise garbage SM outlets. I still maintain SM accounts for my business, art, and writing, but it is seemingly just a pain for what might ultimately be a small SEO payoff when I launch my other businesses. Back to the questions:

1) Can we agree as a society to stop singing Happy Birthday after age 21?

• and •

2) Can someone explain the 5o claps things like I’m 5?

As always, thank you for reading. I will follow you back if you got this far.