End of an Era
I was reading Dooce’s most recent post, a letter to herself on turning “four hundred and twenty months old” entitled “That old hag.” And I was like, oh, fun, let’s plug that into the Google search bar and let it do the math for me to find out how old she is. So I typed in “420 / 12″ (boy does Google have some fun suggestions for people who type in “420,” by the way) and up pops… “= 35.”
After I calmed down a bit I did the math myself, and it turns out Heather Armstrong was born in 1975, which makes her a little less than five-and-a-half years older than me. It doesn’t seem possible that someone who was born in 1975 would be turning thirty-five this year. I mean, 1975 is RECENT and thirty-five is OLD.
In other, related news, a couple days ago I called home and spoke with my dad about possibly coming home in November so I could be there for my birthday, his birthday and Thanksgiving.
“Do you guys have anything planned for then?” I asked, meaning “Do you have any (i.e., out-of-town, not-going-to-be-home-for-a-visit plans) for that period?”
And my dad looked at my mom’s big calendar where she writes down absolutely everything and he was like, “Nope! The only thing on here is
And then he asked what that horrible strangled, kicked-in-the-gut noise coming from my end of the line was.
Which is all a long way of saying
Some of my older friends (i.e., the ones who are in or past their thirties and are not too happy with my moaning and gurgling that thirty is “the edge of decrepitude”) have tried to reason with me, saying that their thirties are/were their favorite age—not a kid anymore, but not yet an old fart.
My problem isn’t really that thirty feels “old.” I don’t think thirtysomethings are decrepit (or at least I wouldn’t say so to their faces) and I don’t think I’m immediately going to start experiencing joint pain and stiffness and hair loss (who am I kidding? I suffer from all of those already) immediately after my birthday.
But thirty does feel like the end of my life as a kid. I’ve been a kid for years, it seems. Avoiding responsibility, playing and goofing off whenever I wanted to, eating unhealthy food, spending my money on random shit. Thirty-year-olds don’t seem like old fogeys, but they do seem like ADULTS.
And I don’t know if I’m ready to be an adult yet.
[Updated because I apparently cannot do arithmetic of any kind. Like that's a surprise. I'm OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOLD.]
