An Alternative to Birthdays: Conception Day

17 years ago, almost immediately after I turned 21, I wrote my weekly column in the University of Alabama's school paper wondering what all the fuss was about.


Well, it wasn't immediately after I turned 21, because that would have meant being at the Crimson White office at midnight. Which I usually was, actually.  But not generally when it was my birthday, and also a Saturday. So I actually wrote the column the first of next week.


But this is not my central point.


The point is, and was, that my birthday was anticlimactic because I should have turned 21 nine months sooner. Instead of my birthday in November, we should have celebrated my Conception Day nine months prior, because that's, at least scientifically, when life begins. As another birthday creeps ever closer, I'm again thinking of the benefits of this approach.


See for yourself:


----------------------------------------------------------------


After minutes of extensive scientific research, I have determined life begins at conception. Or not, depending on whom you ask.


I'm using this space to advocate for either point of view, but it's without serious question that the idea of celebrating your Conception Day is a winner all around. 


Currently, the majority of humans celebrate birthdays, or at least have parties where they pretend to have a good time. But at the potential expense of your upcoming party, this may not be the most accurate way of keeping track of how old we are.


If our lives really do begin when our parents sperm cells and egg cells get together (sorry for putting that mental image in your head), then I propose we begin celebrating our conception days instead of, or at least in addition to, our birthdays.


The advantages of the Conception Day idea are numerous. We'd get presents earlier, and possibly twice a year if we celebrated both occasions. College students would turn 21 nine months earlier, ensuring that they could, um, legally rent cars sooner to avoid missing class in case of needed automotive maintenance. That's not all.


We could retire 9 months sooner, collect social security nine months earlier, and we'd more quickly be eligible for Senior Day discounts at the grocery store. We'd be statistically more likely to still be here for our 100th Conception Day celebration, than for our actual birthday.


And going back to that Senior Day thing, those savings would totally add up over nine months.


The celebration would be better too. Current birthdays are just pretty good. Currently, you get candles, cake, and even presents from your 80-year old grandparents. They suck (the presents, that is), but it's the thought that counts of the effort people go to celebrate your entry into the world. So if we do all that just to honor the day you merely arrived, imagine would much more fun could go into a celebration of your springing into life as an embryo.


For example, instead of awkward old baby pictures popping up on the day of your celebration, you could post old ultrasounds, where everyone would coo about how much you looked like a peanut.  Some people get a kiss on their birthdays. Imagine what you'd be in for if you were celebrating Conception Day!


Actually, the biggest problem with the Conception Day idea is probably along these lines. Soon people would start trying to be cute and buying each other Hallmark conception-related items to celebrate, and there would be office Conception Day parties for everyone's big day, and this would get super awkward fast. So we'd have to all start with the understanding that a cake is the only office-appropriate form of celebrating is a simple cake. We don't give diapers to people for their birthdays, so no one should get Viagra on Conception Day.


Can we all just agree to this?


With this rule of Conception Day etiquette out of the way, we can go back to the benefits of Conception Day. Although to realize these benefits, one would have to of course figure out the exact date of one's conception.


This would be the tricky part. And in-depth interview with your parents would be required.


Of course, you could just be lazy and subtract 9 months from your birthday, but this could easily be wrong. You might have been early. Or late. Or born in a leap year. And since the whole point of Conception Day is to accurately count the true time of your existence as a life form, it would be essential to get this right.


So you will need to have your parents recount all the details of their, um, experiences roughly nine months prior to your birth. You will need to know dates, places, and times, just to make sure that a date that started on Friday night didn't end up resulting in you on Saturday morning.


While this may sound uncomfortable, you can take comfort in the idea that if your parents were as old as mine when I was conceived, there may not be too many viable choices on the date. As an added bonus, like me, you might perform this exercise and realize to your considerable surprise that you were born almost exactly nine months after your parents anniversary.


But if your parents were a little younger and more energetic, it may be a little harder to figure out the exact date. So you will have to have them map out in graphic form (by which I mean Microsoft Excel, not the other kind of graphic form) all the possible occasions that could have spawned your existence. Make a bar graph of the conceivable dates (see what I did there?) and their frequency, then average out the distance of these dates from the median by dividing this date by the total number of attempts at forming you into being. That is your Conception Day.   


After you determine this momentous day, the first people who owe you gifts are your parents, if only because you will now never be able to look at them in the same light again. Undoubtedly, the first gift you will ask for is for a way to erase the memory of your Conception Day interview.


But this is a small price to pay for the privilege of suddenly being nine months older.