cold comfort

In less than 2 weeks I will pass out of my 20s and into my 30s. I'm not impressed with this turn of events. No lie. I'm not angry about it like I was when I turned 27 and passed out of my late-mid 20s and into my late 20s, but I'm generally not having any of this.

I think it's just not time for me to be 30. You may think I'm being ridiculous, but I don't really care. There are just so many things I thought would be different about my life when I hit 30. Book publishing and tenure and promotion and such are cold comforts at best.

But, as one of my colleagues pointed out, if I consider the options, it may not be so horrible. 30 or death? Death or 30? Given those options, I choose life, which I suppose means I choose 30.

When I set out to write this post, I thought I would make it funny. I don't think I've succeeded. Perhaps 30 is just not very funny.

nostalgia + narcissism

Every once in a while, I remember an old post I wrote back when my blog lived on Upsaid instead of Blogger (see the nevada project archives below). It may be a bit of narcissism combined with a much larger dose of nostalgia, but it makes me ridiculously happy to read many of those old posts. I love reading them for a number of reasons that I'm not going to explain in any detail whatsoever:

* It helps me remember who I was before I was here.
* It makes me feel more hopeful and optimistic about the future.
* It reminds me that I can be a decent writer when I choose to be.
* It makes me love all of you dear friends even more.
* It reminds me that I used to write more often about more interesting topics.
* It makes me feel whole.

graying

More depressing than finding those first white hairs is shedding full-length ones. I've been getting white hairs since I was 21. I credit the gene that causes early graying to my father, who grayed quite early. I used to studiously pull out my white hairs, and they are truly white not gray, but I've long since given up on that. There are just too many of them to waste time hunting them down. Of course, if a white hair happens to make itself too noticeable, it will be plucked out in an instant, but that is a different scenario.

Those of you with blond or lighter-colored hair are quite lucky because your hair tends not to gray as quickly, and even if it does, the color-contrast is so minimal that your gray and white hairs are probably unnoticeable. Not so with darker-shades of hair. Fortunately, while I have more white hair than I'd like, most of my hair remains its original color, so you wouldn't really know about all my white hairs except that I'm blogging it for the world to read.

To get back to the beginning, however, it was utterly depressing for me realize that I was shedding white hairs along with my brown ones. It was as traumatic as finding the first white hair. Not only did the shed hair exist, but it existed long enough to grow to a foot or so in length, live a full hair lifespan, and be shed naturally just as a colored hair. Ugh.

If you think I'm exaggerating or being a bit melodramatic, you probably haven't been "blessed" with your first white or gray hair yet. Just wait. Someday you'll understand.