Boy oh boy friends! Actually, girl oh girl — it’s 2018. Actually, woman oh woman let’s be on the safe side.

Another exciting year! With the final stats in, I’m proud to report a 31% YoY increase in Happy Birthday Posts for Age 27! This year, I rounded out the day with a whopping 196 — so tantalizingly close to 200, and yet I couldn’t bring myself to text all four of my ex-boyfriends to get me over the line (there’s no one else I’m shameless enough to text. Actually, that’s a blatant lie, I have no shame). Let’s take a look back at the last 9 years.

2018 showed remarkable progress. Still, I haven’t yet reached the highs of 225 at age 20. Here are some hypotheses as to why I’ve improved since last year, and then I’ll cover hypotheses about why I still can’t break my record.

Methodology

I use the counts Facebook gives me. This double-counts people who write multiple times, and it also includes any wall post on April 26th as a Happy Birthday post. I stopped counting when April 26th ended on the West Coast, so your belated Happy Birthdays mean NOTHING TO ME. You’re dead to me, motherfuckers. I also don’t count ‘Happy Birthday’ texts, not even this charming one from a gynecologist I went to once for an STD test:

Improvements

Some theories for the 31% growth:

I told literally everyone I talked to in the last month to write on my wall

I accept every friend request. I don’t personally know many of the people who wrote on my wall, but rest assured — now that you’re a fb-happy-bday-poster, I ‘know’ you in the biblical sense. I’m also not sure what ‘in the biblical sense’ means, but I assume it has something to do with FB happy birthday posts, because they are our genesis.

I got fake eyelashes this year so obviously that made me more popular.

My birthday posts have been going up monotonically since I was 23. I started plotting my posts at age 24, so that could account for it. I think I was also a huge loser when I was 23. I don’t remember specifics, but I do know I was living at my parents’ house GOD WHAT A LOSER. I also remember kinda almost giving someone a handjob on the subway. But I didn’t. But I almost did. So I deserved a low happy birthday-post-count.

Failures

I’m disappointed that after 3 years of birthday tracking I still can’t top my record at age 20. Here are some reasons I think I failed once again, and some possible areas for improvement.

Facebook shit a brick this year: I still love Mark Zuckerberg more than water, but I also don’t drink that much water. It seems that the masses have turned against him.

I think I started posting too much and perhaps got unfollowed? What a thought!

Due to my fake eyelashes, many might not remember me. I’m the same girl, I swear! Just, like, way more beautiful.

SOME people (Jeff Dean) seem to think it’s ‘funny’ to ‘ruin my bit’ by deliberately texting me instead of writing on my wall, and claiming they don’t want to ‘enable’ me when actually they would just be SUPPORTING me and supporting the PURSUIT OF KNOWLEDGE.

Final Thoughts

It was weird to break out ggplot again to write this. Let me tell you — I may be working off a smaller laptop now (owing to no longer having a tech job), but nothing makes you feel old like having to rotate your x-axis labels 90 degrees to fit in all the years you’ve been logging happy birthday posts. And I’m sure that’s an extremely relatable feeling that you can all agree with.

Obviously it would have been a very nice touch if the days of the week were in the right order, but I’m not a #datascientist anymore, so you better believe I don’t give a shit. Also, I don’t have a job, so all the days are one big jumble for me anyway.

Also I loved seeing all of your posts! So many participants in this happy birthday tracking. I really enjoy all your hot takes, especially those from men. There’s truly nothing that makes me happier than a man trying to add his own jokes to mine. My heart fills with joy.

I’m very optimistic that 27 will be a good year! It’s the same day of the week as when I turned 21, so maybe this is my year to finally drink wine!!!

Tune in next year!