Two weeks to the day and I’ll be 30. It’s appropriate at a moment like this to step back and take stock.
Physically, I am basically holding up, despite the accumulation of various small reminders of my advancing age. Yes, three decades’ worth of laughter and good cheer have crinkled the skin around my eyes. Sure, a few errant eyebrow hairs have grown to frightening lengths, an advance force indicating I will soon be making room in my toiletry kit for garden shears and a home waxing kit. OK, my pendulous man-breasts continue their journey southward at an ever-increasing rate, locked as they are in a heated race with my jowls and wattle to determine who can be the first to reach my bunioned toes. I confess, the erection fairy visits only once, twice a month tops. And, guilty as charged, I do occasionally doze off in the mid-afternoon and plow my SUV through crowded outdoor markets*. All of this is part of the natural process of aging.
Mentally, the primary indication of senescence is my increasing intolerance of the young. Of course, this has nothing to do with my age, and everything to do with the fact that young people these days are stupid and dumb. Have you talked to, say, a 21-year-old backpacker recently? Always spouting off about “the future” and their “plans” and “the latest trends in music, fashion, and culture.” What’s that you say? You’re Canadian and your boyfriend’s from New Zealand, and you’re not sure what’s going to happen when you go home to your respective countries but you’re totally in love? Don’t worry, I’m sure everything will work out fine. It always does. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to lie down somewhere, away from this light…
I don’t feel old. No one of my generation does. We all think we’re just out of college, that these jobs we’ve been working for the last eight or nine years aren’t really careers, they’re just temporary gigs while we figure out what we’re really going to do with our lives. Sure, a couple of us have screwed up along the way and acquired spouses or houses or kids, but even those wretched few are occasionally liable to chuck in their jobs, get sick on merlot, listen to pirated alternative music, or otherwise throw their lot firmly in with the counterculture. Hell, I’m so youthful that I still giggle uncontrollably over the sexual connotations of the term “breakfast burrito.”
I was going to write about how the real significance of this birthday is not so much my physical age as the increasing dissonance between my mental self-conception and reality. But all this has been said before. I already know that my musical tastes are popularly referred to as Dadrock or Adult Alternative. Yes, I did see that NYT article — the same one that everyone else saw, and hated — about how 30 is the new 21, how the 30th birthday is the new Bar Mitzvah/wedding reception/graduation blowout, how irritating Manhattan socialites are the new irritating Manhattan socialites, and so on and so forth. The crappy part of being firmly of a generation is that it’s virtually impossible to be in any way unique. But at least we’ll all grow old together.
* Incidentally, I did attend the San Francisco farmers market while I was in California. It wasn’t easy to face down my fear of elderly drivers, but the way I figure it, if I can’t enjoy outrageously expensive organic produce in the company of fellow yuppies, then the octogenarians win.**
** For those readers who don’t follow the local news in Cali, some senior recently fell asleep at the wheel and parked his car on top of an outdoor market in Santa Monica. Jokes are always funnier when you explain them. Especially tasteless ones that trade on both recent tragedy and fear of terrorism. There ought to be a word for the delight felt in making an inappropriate comment, and that word should be polysyllabic and German.
