I’ve been watching the clock all day. Waiting for midnight, which will be in about 20 minutes, because I will be saying goodbye to my 20s forever. I have become, pathetically morbid about this particular birthday. Something, about the age, is grating on me and I cannot tell or say for sure what it is. I keep hearing from women in their 30s+ that the 30s were the perfect time of their life. Still young and youthful but not stupid and cocksure. The ages of 30-35 seemed to be the golden age for a woman because she knows what she wants and how to get it.
Personally I have not figured out why my obsession with my age is so frantic, but it is. I’ve been swapping between moping and careening about this day. Some say I should just grow the fuck up and deal with it and personally, like I always say, I wish I could agree with them and do said growing the fuck up but you’ll find (as I find) that what we are being told to do is not as easy as it seems. I’m still waiting for the answers and the tellings that people keep saying and yet these same said people will open and fornicate with their mouths but yet the fornication is dry and cheap.
Sometimes I love my euphemisms. I thought I had alliterated (no such word) but thanks to m-w.com, I found out I was wrong.
10 minutes.
midnight means nothing. If you want to get pedantic about it, i was actually born in the afternoon — 4 something on June 12, 1972. It was rainy, muggy and humid. My father left my mother on the corner by the hospital when she was in labor and she didn’t see him until three days later. I often wonder if my mother feels guilt or love or something about my father, even though they had been divorced for over 25 years at his death. I cannot be the only adult in history who feels like a bus ran them over since their father has died. The other thing that kills me is that my birthday always falls around Fathers Day and for the last three years I have been furious at all the e-mail I have received via direct marketing for said holiday. I want to call up Amazon.com, Cdnow.com, bestbuy.com and the rest of the lot and strangle them for being so insensitive. I wish you could opt-out of certain marketing advertising because of whatever.
In five minutes I will die, I want you to know that.
When you hit 30, you think you’ll have x amount of stuff done with your life. You’ll have finished college. Gotten a job with a firm you wanted to work for. Get married and spawn brats. Have the dogs and the whole nine yards. At 25 I bemoaned the loss of my youth and laughingly, I can recall feeling the same way then as I do know. Sitting in a BART station with Christian and yet feeling like my life had gone to complete and utter shit. That no one, no one would ever fucking love me the way I want(ed) to be loved. I remember thinking that Christian did not love me and I was right, while the location and names have changed, it’s still the same damn fucking story.
In three minutes I will implode.
Five years is a long time. A very long time. I have moved cross- country twice, been in a few relationships. I basically lived.
BOOM. I blew up.
Five years ago, if you would have asked me where I was going to be when I was 30, i certainly would not have said in the ‘burbs of Washington DC, on a flaming red/pink duvet anxiously watching three clocks for the stroke of midnight.
I’ve been accused of being whiny about this birthday — and I think I have every right to be whiny. The thing is, is that I’m tired of people who harangue me about turning 30 (or basically feel that it’s their due to tell me that my ovaries are getting crusty) and are not supplying any real answers.
the bottom line is this:
I do not feel that I particularly smart or gifted or special. I am not fishing for compliments, I am just being honest with myself. But there is something in me, in my core that doesn’t seem to agree with normal day to day life. At work I want to rip my hair out because I am so bored and the job seems to be tedious. The thought of what I do on a daily basis makes me cringe when I realise how menial it sounds. Everything from washing clothes to taking a shower seems to be beneath me. I cannot comprehend day to day life for another fourty years, I will kill myself if it is like this. I feel bored, in a rut and itching to get into mischief. The sheer fact that to share this with another person and to make this the basis of a relationship? Seems laughable and pitiful, at best. Something is wrong and I’m aware but at the same token a little voice in the back of my head keeps saying ‘waht if you are right and they were all wrong’.
I keep telling people that I am waiting for something. I do not know what I am waiting for but I am waiting for something and it will be soon. When that happens, you will all see what I finally mean.
Happy 30th Birthday to me.
Wednesday June 12 2002 — 00:30 -04:00
x0x0x
ps: it was suggested that on saturday for my party the theme be a ‘death party’. i thought that was a terrific idea until I was later told that it was too morbid or perverse. They have no sense of humour