strike that

twenty nine and eleven twelfths

The thing is that I’m turning thirty, one month from today.

Leaving my twenties is like leaving a foreign country I’ve been visiting. Sure there were those times when my bag got stolen and I couldn’t remember the word for ice and I had to share my bus seat with a caged chicken, but I really don’t want to leave. I’ve met fantastic people and figured out the public transit and I know what to order in a bar, and how to say cheers in the native language. And there were all these other things I meant to do while I was here that I somehow didn’t get around to. And it’s not that I’m unhappy about where I’m going. I’ve just really enjoyed where I’ve been. Given the choice I’d stay a while longer.

In my twenties I lived in at least twenty places, dorms and tents and a Brooklyn apartment too small for a bed, and a cabin in the rainforest with a gap between the walls and the roof. I learned to drive stick shift and I learned to ride a motorcycle and I learned to get around with just a bike. I learned a little Spanish and a little Dutch and I got a lot better at talking to people in English – people I was dating and people I was friends with and people at parties and people next to me in line.

I didn’t learn to dance or sing well, but I learned to do them anyway.

In my twenties I fell in love, at least twice in the real way but a thousand other times I’d count as well, and I got my heart squashed in that way that makes you want to not eat for a month. I dated a couple programmers and some rather hot European guys and a sculptor who lived in his van. I grew out of my attraction to depression, tortured solitude, ennui, and martyrdom. I still like messy hair.

In my twenties I got a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree and I got hired a few times. I started doing yoga and I started running and I ran a marathon, and I joined my first adult sports team. I learned to use all manner of loud dangerous power tools. I learned to SCUBA dive.

I stopped watching television and I stopped sleeping late and I stopped being embarrassed, and I mostly gave up guilt, jealousy, and grudges. I do not miss any of these things.

My politics got both more certain and more complicated, and I no longer find it useful or wise to categorically dismiss things like all organized religion and all republicans everywhere. I developed an unexpected and rather fierce, though informed, patriotism. I started listening to country music. I’d like to think these facts are unrelated.

I still don’t smoke or drink coffee, and I still don’t want a white picket fence or a predictable job or kids right this second. But I think I’d be amenable to a partner at this point, if the right guy were to show up with a box of disguises and a good sense of adventure.

So there’s me, nearly thirty.

I’m not much of a planner. I always freeze up when I get asked Was such-and-such what you expected? because my brain just doesn’t work like that – it’s usually too busy being stunned by the moment. And whatever I plan seems to go nothing like I’d anticipated. So I’m not going to make any wild predictions here about the next ten years. I’ll just be honest and optimistic and vague.

I hope that when I turn forty I’m as amazed by everything as I am now. I’d like to know a lot more about a lot of new things. I’d like to be doing work that I love, and that I feel is important. I’d like to live in some small house/boat/apartment/cabin/whatever in some beautiful country American or otherwise, with mismatched dishes and a garden and a dog, and some kids whom I maybe didn’t give birth to and some partner whom I feel lucky about every day.

I would like to be kinder and less judgmental. I would like to do big unwise things to help out people I hardly know.

I have ten people in the contacts menu of my mobile phone right now whom I knew when I was twenty. I’d like them all to still be in my phone – or my credit card or my wristchip or wherever we keep such things then - in ten more years. And I hope many of you new-at-thirty folks will stick around as well. We can visit each other in our flying cars because by then it will be 2016, which by then I guess will sound less absolutely impossibly crazy than it does right now.

posted by tortaluga @ 1:24 AM