What is in a date?

"I just remembered that today's my birthday." This sentence was spoken by Nick, a character in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. It seems surprising that anybody would forget something like that, but people do it all the time. I do it.

"Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day..."
From Shakespeare's Macbeth. Possibly explaining why people forget that it's their birthday.

We live from day to day and generally don't pay a whole lot of notice to the date. And then we wonder why it didn't hit us that it's our birthday or anniversary or the day we were supposed to be at the dentist and dammit now I'm gonna have to make another appointment and they'll probably charge me for not giving 24-hour notice. The calendar, the dates, hell, all of time, is just so arbitrary and made up. Humans are the ones who stick Post-it notes on the days in our pitiful attempts to label them, name them, put our mark on them. But the days will creep on at their petty pace with absolutely no heed for us.

You're probably expecting my next quote to be from "Dust in the wind" by Kansas, right? Well, forget it. I hate that song. I'm just raveling a thread that started with the realization that I missed my anniversary on a screenwriting group I'm part of. It has been an everyday enjoyment for me for over a year (I joined on Friday the 13th, June 2008. Is that another meaningless date or something ominously foreboding?) I feel like I know these people, and I even recently mourned the death of one of its members, a colorful, wonderful lady whom I always loved hearing from. But this date slipped right by me.

Do birthdays matter? Do dates matter? Do we really need to stop and acknowledge the anniversary of every freaking thing? I don't know. But it seems to be human nature to try to hang on to them.