December 20th was Pat's 24th birthday. I'm sure a lot of you know what birthday punches are - the high-school tradition of punching someone whatever number of years they just turned. It was a fun excuse to beat up our friends. I was never huge into celebrating with birthday punches - I mean, I survived my way through it when people did it to me, but, for the past few years at least, I'd pretty much forgotten about them entirely. Then, when mentioning Pat's birthday to someone else on this…