the birthday collection

Since around 1990, I’ve collected birthdays. I’m not sure when it became a collection, as such, with the aim of knowing a birthday for every day of the year, but I think it was around the time I moved to Berkeley for uni, or back east to NYC. Moving things is unpleasant, and any desire to collect objects (clothes, books, spectacles, etc) fell away. Any shopping excursion was haunted by the refrain, “but I’d have to move that” and so I rarely bought. Indeed, from 1991-2002 the longest I called an apartment home was 11 months! And though I’ve been in the same building for over five years now, I still don’t like to clutter the place up with stuff.

So I keep birthdays. I remember them without the help of blackberries or facebooks. Every day, I have someone to celebrate—except for the following 4 days [updated Oct 2011]:

April 20 & 28
Aug 18
Nov 29

Once I have each day, I want to begin a project. The birthday suit project, perhaps, and photograph someone in his birthday for each day of the year.

Slowly but surely!