Birthday during the CB? Can be quite cham, hor?

All over the Internet, you can now find lots of cheery, chirpy listicles on how to grow one year older - even if you are stuck alone at home 24/7 with your pet terrapin, too many potato chips in your gut, and a half-curtained view of your yoga-fanatic neighbour across the street.

Some cheery, chirpy tips include sending yourself flowers (you'd rather buy yourself more potato chips with that $58 seriously), baking yourself muffins (and have to remember which day is an even date or an odd one at Phoon Huat?), taking a nice, long bubbly bath (hello, people here mostly have tiny shower cubicles at home only, okay?) and reminiscing about your birthday last year (only cheery, chirpy people do such things, can).

The brutal truth? It's no fun being a Taurus or Gemini in 2020. Because it only means that you had to celebrate it under CB conditions.

Here are some reasons why.

Meanwhile, please be good, stay home, wear a mask when you are out and practise social distancing - or else those star signs after Gemini may soon also understand what this is all about.

When this is all over, then we celebrate

If you are not a very popular person among your family and friends, CB time is a really good excuse for them to forget about you conveniently or say something very CBB (read: Cannot Be Bothered), like "I owe you a meal but don't know when we can meet leh" or "I was going to get you a cake but gahmen say cannot buy cakes that time, sorry".

Zoom celebrations are just not the same

If you are a very popular person among your family and friends, they may throw a Zoom online party for you.

A trending example we've seen these two months: Everyone orders in a slice of cake, everyone logs in at the same time, everyone sings happy birthday, everyone tucks into their own slice of cake and everyone behaves like they are having fun.

Until they realise they have to do it again and again for the other 26 Taurus and Gemini family members and friends in their lives.

Gifts are slow in coming

Your givers probably didn't anticipate CB or lockdowns around the world so they happily ordered their pressies from some far-flung village across the globe, only to realise that shipping will now take 1,593 years.

And actually, what good is a passport holder hand-spun from fallen mirabilis jalapa flower petals now when all you want is limitless GrabFood credits.

You can't have your annual birthday vacation

You only needed this one last destination to fulfil Your Wanderlust Bucket List. And now, you can't even get from Serangoon to Sembawang to see your GF. Virtual tours? That's just a 2020 term for documentaries.

Let them eat cake… if you can find one

Marie-Antoinette anyhow say one. If your birthday fell during the time when cake shops were not allowed to operate, having your cake and eating it was, well, not a piece of cake.

Neh mind, I bake my own cake

But have you seen the empty baking supplies shelves in supermarkets recently? It's like no Great Singapore Sale anymore but there's now the Great Singapore Bake Off.

Besides, do you really want to post a photo of a birthday cake that you made for yourself? It's the cake equivalent of having to fry your own dough fritters at a particular famous hawker stall - so pointless, so sad and it comes out looking inedible.

For the latest updates on the coronavirus, visit here.

This article was first published in Wonderwall.sg.