thurty
I turned 30 on Monday, at 6:10pm. My mother reminds me of this every year because she distinctly remembers the details of that one day in 1974 when she pushed a watermelon-sized human out of her loins.
This picture was taken shortly after my birthday dinner on Saturday. Someone joked about going to Best Buy afterwards, and for some reason we did. Rickmond found a digital camera that was attached to a photo printer and we totally hijacked it. Best Buy is fun.
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So far, 30 feels the same. In fact, I’m actually looking forward to my 30s.
High school sucked cause I was a loser, and I’m not trying to one-up anyone here, but I seriously, no-shit, did not have a single friend for nigh 2 years. Even animals hated me. I had a pet Thai crab whose sole purpose in life was to escape from me. It eventually succeeded and a few weeks later, I found its desiccated body about a hundred yards from my dorm room. At my boarding school in Carpinteria, you could actually see the ocean from my room, and the crab had run a hundred yards in the opposite direction. Stupid crab.
College was much much better. People were nicer and I figured out how to become a significantly less creepy and annoying person. Not only did it make it easier for people to interact with me, but it made me want to kick my own ass less. I finally got laid. That was cool. I made friends, and that was even cooler. However, I spent an inordinate amount of energy trying not to be bitter and bitchy. I can’t keep track of how many of my friends have told me that I looked mean when they first met me.
After college, my general twenties were pretty fun. I became a fairly well-adjusted person. I got my own subscription to National Geographic and that made me feel very grown up. I became significantly less angstful, but I didn’t know who I was. One thing I used to always tell the younger actors in LCC (the theater group I started at UCLA) was, “You gotta learn to be yourself on stage. Once you do that, you can work on playing someone else.” I felt like a hypocrite, cause I didn’t even know who I was supposed to be.
My latter twenties, I must say, have been pretty darn swell, and I think it’s because out of any time in my life, with the exception of maybe my early early childhood, I have the best idea of who I am. This makes it easier to meet people. It’s made me significantly less insecure. It’s made me more forgiving. If my thirties are a continuation of my latter twenties, then I ain’t complaining at all.
When I was a kid, I thought that by the time I was thirty I’d be a doctor, married with kids, and that I’d own a flying car. So far, none of that is true, but, like I said, I’m not complaining - except about the flying car. I really wanted that flying car.
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