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It doesn't seem like it should be so bad to turn 30. Is anything really going to be that different when I go from 29 years and 364 days to 30? It's just a number, a state of mind, it doesn't mean anything. Yeah, right. First of all, people cannot stop asking about it. "Wow, you're 30?!" "How do you feel?" "Are you freaked out?" Well, I wasn't. Actually, I haven't felt that strange about it--even when my dad reminisced about the cover of a Time magazine published around the week I was born. It said "Never Trust Anyone Over 30." That did inspire me to look in an almanac. According to ours, absolutely nothing happened on the Monday I was born, but the day before, Vince Lombardi's Green Bay Packers won their second straight Super Bowl, and the coach hinted that he was retiring--at just 54. Green Bay's football dominance 30 years later isn't the only thing that seems familiar. Urban crime was being discussed at the White House--by Eartha Kitt and Lady Bird Johnson. North Korea provoked the U.S. government's wrath--in this case by seizing a Navy intelligence ship. Israel took over some of Old Jerusalem. China was a mess. There were Olympics, and astronauts orbited the moon. Later in the year, Martin Luther King Jr. was killed. Then Bobby Kennedy. Helen Keller died in 1968, which amazes me; I thought she died in 1930 or so. Interestingly, there is not one mention of the weather. I focused on what was going on during my last week as a twentysomething while struggling with nagging concerns that I was losing my sight, hearing and mind. As on most Thursday nights, I watched TV this last one. But I realized that after this week, I will now be older than the Friends--at least their TV ages. I have mixed feelings about that. It was excellent timing for the show to introduce the Phoebe/in vitro fertilization/surrogate mother plot line the week that Dr. Richard Seed announced he was going to try human cloning--something they weren't doing in 1968, thank god. I'm glad to have lived through Seinfeld in prime time. Since I was determined not to concede my age, at 11 pm I went to Saucebox for the debut of Igloo (the name was another bit of fortuitous timing). Organized by Crystal Light, who hosted the event in a gorgeous blue sequined dress that revealed annoyingly fabulous legs, this debuting dance event drew a large, well-turned-out crowd for a cold Thursday night in January. At least I think there were a lot of people there--it was so dark I couldn't see very well, and a spinning red laser kept hitting me in the face. I danced until 2 am and fell into bed content that my newly advanced age wasn't slowing me down. Friday I overslept. But I recovered and later went to Yoko's on Southeast Gladstone Street for dinner. One of the things people keep asking me is, "Do you wish you had a family?" which is a really awful thing to ask someone in any case. But when one of the kids sitting at the next table became almost hysterical at the sight of her cucumber salad, which her mother assured her she liked, I happily remembered the comment another mother had made to me last weekend at Mount Hood Meadows. Trudging back through the snow to collect her son, who was whining "Mooooommmm" about every 10 seconds, she met my sympathetic look with the words "Use birth control." Good advice. And it's been around longer than me. |
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