Diving Right on into Thirty!

Here is where I bashfully offer up a mea culpa for my extended absence around these parts as of late. I can't help but feel a little like a deadbeat dad whose acting career never took off, returning home and dejectedly walking back in the front door after years of missed little league games and bounced support checks. I hope that eventually your residual feelings of abandonment will dissipate and we can work on having a real relationship again. But if that fails, I'll just try and buy your love by being the cool parent who supplies alcohol for you and your friends.

So let's get started!

Special announcement here folks! --Clears throat, taps microphone-- I have turned thirty years old (and also, um …, 29 years old) since we’ve last spoke! Like every other day in my life other big milestones in my life, the day passed somewhat unsoberly, and it ended with me groggily awaking in a strange hotel room in a foreign country, sans pants.  No really, it did. I was in the Bahamas for a friend’s wedding, but withholding that last bit of info really does make me sound more socially retarded/frighteningly immature/emotionally unstable glamorous, and I bet it makes you feel thankful that I'm not your child/scared for my wellbeing/frightened for Generation Y as a whole jealous. 

Thirty didn’t take me very easily, let me tell ya! I suspect it even had to roofie me into submission, whereas all it really had to do was buy me a few drinks and tell me it drove a BMW. I went in kicking and screaming, but once the last bit of cheap tequila had been processed by my liver enzymes… once that last dehydrated, crow’s feet inducing tear had been wiped away, my first order of business was hair of the dog! to sit down and compose a Dear John Letter to My Twenties. Call me crazy, but rather than admit I'm powerless against certain forces, I find it easier to pretend I’m in a relationship with these intangible things and then "break up with them" because it makes me feel like I have more control over the matter. Uh huh. Oh I agree... it's absolutely genius. Electricity getting shut off? Pffft. No problem, I was totally going to break up with overhead lighting and other modern conveniences anyway. The Rapture* and end of human life as we know it happening on Saturday? I don't care, I am totally over this relationship with earth, it leaves the toilet seat up. I thought writing this Dear John letter would help me come to terms with turning thirty,  and by simulating a break up, it would seem like it was my decision, and mine alone - invariable passage of time aside - to not want to be in my twenties anymore. Totally rational.

*Obligatory Post-Rapture Humorous Photo

Wait - Can I interject for a minute? (Of course I can, it's my blog.) I'm freaking THIRTY, guys. I have just entered my fourth decade of life (I'll hang on a sec while you check that logic, but I assure you its correct). I am officially at that age where instinctively turn down the volume of the rap music in my car if I drive by a group of teenagers so they don't laugh at me. It is no longer socially acceptable to have sex in the backseat of a car. I mean, obviously I'm still going to do it, but I won't be able to shake the nagging suspicion that the people walking by us in the Target parking lot are frowning upon it! Furthermore, I just feel old., Very early bird special in Boca Raton-esque. I don't know what my ovaries look like, but I think they probably resemble Joan Rivers.

So where was I before I rudely interrupted myself? Oh yeah...  Needless to say, that blog entry did not turn out to be the journalistic crowning achievement I had planned for it to be. I had read similar themed letters in the past which always seemed to possess a certain poignancy that I tried my best to emulate. Instead, mine possessed… Satan himself. It was downright combative which is actually truly remarkable as I am a sole human being writing a sole blog entry. I actually found myself getting offended with the ease in which I belittled and abused myself under the guise of treating My Twenties (and therefore, myself) like a bad boyfriend. It sounded good in premise, but it didn't work out that way, not by a fucking longshot. You see, arguing with yourself is one thing, but actually getting angry and refusing to talk to yourself over something you've written about yourself is another entirely. That's no small feat! Or rather, it’s no small feat if you’re NOT suffering from undiagnosed multiple personality disorder as I suspect we are I am. If one was to read this letter the end result would be total and absolute confirmation that I am undoubtably, certifiably, batshit fucking crazy. But then again, I believe just reading this paragraph is confirmation of that anyway.

So I scrapped the Dear John Letter and instead, as one is wont to do at such a milestone, I decided it was due time to subject myself to the ever joyful, spirit crushing exercise of “Listing My Life’s Accomplishments to Date, All the While Comparing and Contrasting to Similarly Aged Friends and Acquaintances on Facebook to See How I Measure Up” or more easily, The LMLATDATWCACTSAFAAOFTSHIMU List. (I like to keep things simple.) I figured that seeing my esteemed pedigree in print and reflecting back on my accomplishments over the last decade would cheer me right up. Yay for narcissism!

So I got down to business. Upon starting The LMLATDATWCACTSAFAAOFTSHIMU list, I couldn’t help but notice that the trajectory of my List of Accomplishments in direct correlation to my age was not unlike that of the Challenger Explosion of 1986. Lots of excitement and hope in the first seconds of take off. Things are looking good... bought a car at 20 and left the nest at 22!. Optimism, mixed with humbling feelings of pride watching it soar upward: Homeowner at 24! College graduate at 25! I'm proud to be an American! Then comes the confusion and feeling that something is definitely not right here: Soul crushing break up at 26, and a too little, too late learned lesson in variable mortgage interest rates. Then shock sets in as you can't even believe this is unfolding before your eyes: Commence quarter life crisis, complete with quitting my job and self-homelessify myself at 27,. Then of course you all know what happens next, and we've all heard the jokes about finding Christa McAuliffe's head and shoulders off the beach. My point is, you've gotta pick up the pieces... no pun intended.

The good news is, I'm not homeless anymore (yay for progress!), but frankly, I'm not accomplishing a whole hell of a lot either. It's gotten to the point where I write "create to-do list" on my to-do list, just so I have something to cross off at the end of the day. I still have yet to make someone the luckiest man alive by becoming his trophy wife, I still have yet to make my first million (still waiting on that wire transfer to clear from that prince in Nigeria!), and I still haven't experienced motherhood and the luxuries that come with it like using the carpool lane. My accomplishments are on a much less grandiose scale than that. For example, if I may, (and believe me, I may because it’s my blog) my biggest accomplishment of my 29^th year was that I finally learned how to dive. Not SCUBA dive, not sky dive, but… dive. Headfirst. Into a pool of water. From a fixed surface. But not with a running start, that's too scary.

I’ll let you digest that for a minute.

That’s right folks. At the ripe old age of 29, I learned how to dive into a swimming pool, and I’ll be damned if I wasn’t the best in the under seven group swim class at the Y. No longer would I gaze wistfully over my shoulder while climbing down the ladder as my friends dove into the pool all synchronized like extras from that birth control commercial. And of course, there is always some asshole showoff doing a backflip too… just because he can. It’s like I was in the god damned Summer Olympics, and I was still participating in the “Special” League.  But now that I joined the ranks of fellow divers, I no longer needed to pretend that the Pencil Dive is “cool” and that’s why I chose to enter the pool like a piece of uncooked spaghetti.  Or telling concerned onlookers “no it didn't hurt, I totally MEANT to do that belly flop”, as I fought back the urge to scream at the internal bleeding in my midsection. Instead, I learned how to harness the power of gravity and use it to MY ADVANTAGE to flip my head to where my feet normally go and vice versa so that i could propel myself into a body of water in a graceful fashion, wetting my body from my hair to my feet as if by magic. And I was barely 29 years old! Pfffttt.... Beat that, Similarly Aged Facebook Friends and Acquaintances! Taking their cue of posting pictures of their offspring for everyone to ooh and ahh over, all summer long I posted pictures of me and My Dive. My Dive at 3 weeks old, Me and My Dive up at the lake, Me and My Dive on a boat! etc.

 Me and My Dive on our first date

So with that said, my list of accomplishments was also a bust --or rather, it was not accomplished -- but something good did come out of it. I chose instead to make a list of things I haven't accomplished. It's an ongoing piece, and I hope to always be adding to it. Let's be honest here folks, there's a whole lot of stuff out there just waiting to be accomplished, and I, for one, am not accomplishing any of it! High off the glory of recounting my diving success story, I've decided that's enough accomplishment for one decade. I mean, if I could learn to dive, I can do anything! The world is my oyster, and I am ready to.... eat it? That makes no sense. I really don't get that saying at all.

Things I Failed to Do Before Turning 30

Start a gang. A real gang too, not one of those finger snapping dance ones.

Win something. Anything. Preferably something that comes with one of those big checks.

Learn to spell "acquaintances" without having a squiggly red line appear underneath

Play Marco Polo in the grotto at the Playboy Mansion

Learn to stop staring at people in restaurants without my boyfriend having to nudge me

Catch a terrorist. Or even a predator.

Find out what "the world is your oyster" means

Tie my shoes without having to make bunny ears out of the laces.

Pull up to a gas pump with my gas tank on the correct side

Find Waldo

Keep my pin number separate from my ATM Card

Play a corpse on CSI, with a credited role

Sell my eggs

Happen upon a neighborhood game of double dutch and join in on a whim

Balance a checkbook. Or actually use my checkbook. Find my checkbook when I need it. Not waste checks by writing large, fictional sums on them just to see how cool it looks.

To not instinctively say “then why don’t you maaaarry it?” in my head whenever someone says they love something

Successfully learn to sing along to "It's the End of the World As We Know It" even with the lyrics open in front of me on the computer, so that I can impress friends if it happens to come on the radio

Remember to pack my toothbrush when going on vacation. Never fails.

Suppress my urge to skip merrily when the desire to do so over comes me.

Beat Bald Bull

Dive Headfirst into a pool of water from a fixed surface

Karma Drama

Wow I can’t believe its February 2nd and this is my first post of 2010. I’ve been very busy with the writing job I referenced a couple posts ago. It takes up an awful lot more time than I imagined it would, and it makes me miss my blog ever so much. I’m thinking of going back in time and lobbying the Mayan’s for an eighth day of the week to be put on the calendar, and if it passes I think I’ll call it “Actuallydoaalltheshityousetouttodothisweekandnothatdoesnotmeanlieinbedandwatchlifetimemoviesallday” I think it has a nice ring, no?

Just to briefly catch you up, Matt and I just returned from visiting friends in California this past Sunday. Our trip was postponed a week due to the incessant rain and El Nino like, “only happens once every ten years” type weather patterns that were scheduled to begin the day we flew in - and of course - end the day we flew out. God hates me, obv, but I’ll get to that later. We had a great time out there, although one day spent ambling along Rodeo Drive amongst the beautiful people was all it took for me to anxiously come to the realization: "I don’t belong here." I felt like I walked into the prom naked (cue record scratch). I literally had to hold my hand over the top of my Starbucks coffee cup to prevent spare change being tossed in by the wealthy passerby taking pity on my (horror!) last season Banana Republic tee.

Oh and did I mention that there was a gaggle of 5’11”, chewed-up-ring-fingered, average-women-self-esteem-destroying, Brazilian supermodels on every corner? I couldn’t get out of there fast enough… eyes wide with fear, slowing backing away and making excuses for the sorry human being I was in comparison to their divinity. (The gym was closed! The burritos were 2 for 1!) I imagine it’s how the perps feel once the girl goes to get a drink and Chris Hansen walks into the room. The playing field had just drastically unleveled itself. As a matter of fact, I was kicked off the team for not making weight. Thank god we got out of there, before I contracted anorexia. Today is my second acai berry and wheat grass free day and I am starting to feel like my old fat kid self again. Instead of riding bikes around Venice Beach all I want to do is nap. It’s good to be home.

So lately I’ve been thinking about karma. Not in an ominously tacky, baby-mama, “you gon’ get yours” facebook status sort of way, but more about how the good that we do will affect us later on in life. It seems like in my case it’s the old adage “no good deed goes unpunished’. Like, I’ll let someone cut out in front of me in traffic, only to watch them sail through the next yellow light leaving me stuck at the red one. Or I’ll throw a dollar or some change into the tip jar at Dunkin’s only to find that later on I need that exact amount to complete a purchase later in the day. I will then use my debit card instead, only undoubtedly I will overdraw my account and get charged $33.00 in bank fees. Or you know, I’ll make a deal with Matt that in lieu of Christmas presents this year, we will instead buy each other plane tickets to California, only the exact week we plan to go, California will experience incessant rain and El Nino like, “only happens once every ten years” type weather patterns thus postponing our trip and costing us an additional $320 in change fees. You know, things like that.

Which segways me nicely into my next point. (Which it should. Because I wrote it that way.)

Yesterday I happened upon a lost wallet on the ground outside my local coffee shop. It was literally brimming with cash, overflowing and stuffed so tight it could barely close. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I looked around briefly before gently picking it up off the ground, fearing a tackle from behind with someone screaming “STOP THIEF!” in my ear. Once in hand, I then approached the only other person outside asking if it belonged to him. The man took it from my hand and started rifling through it, counting the cash, looking at the paystub inside etc. In the awkward minute or two that passed, I took notice of the man’s attire and nicotine stained fingers and realized I had just handed a cash stuffed wallet to a homeless man. So again, I asked… a bit more firmly this time: “Um sir, is this YOUR wallet?” His brain worked overtime as he contemplated his next move, and then honesty (I think he was too drunk to form a lie) got the better of him. He shook his head no, although he continued still to rifle through the wallet as he muttered to himself. Once I wrestled it from his sweaty hand, I brought it into the coffee shop and asked around if it belonged to anybody. Nobody claimed ownership, so I pulled out the ID card and found out that it belonged to a local fireman. I called the fire department and made arrangements to have it returned. I then went about my day and waited – positively giddy – for the heaven’s to shine down on me and for some form of positive karmic retribution of my good deed to come my way.

I quickly got tired of waiting for karma to come my way, and instead went looking for it. First I checked the “abandoned property” list online to see if maybe, just maybe, I had somehow forgotten about a bank account I had opened back when I was sixteen and earning a living wiping wrinkled, elderly ass at my local nursing home. Maybe I had forgotten about a $5.50 an hour deposit I made back then, and the interest had compounded over the years to a cool million or two. Nope, no such luck.

I checked for recently deceased wealthy relatives I didn't know I had, and found none. I inquired as to whether I was due for a raise and got laughed at. I checked my email to see if a book publisher had happened across this blog and wanted to advance me a million to pen my life story, and it hasn't happened yet. Then I started to get desperate. I bought a scratch ticket or two (or six) and lost on all of them. Hell, I even waited at home all night for the Publisher's Clearing House. They never came.

So I implore you karma, why must you toy with me?

A full 24 hours later and nothing good has happened to me. But then again, nothing bad has happened to me either. (Save for getting the finger from a 90 year old relic as she cut me off at the rotary at lunch.) So maybe my good deed was just SO good, that it sort of balanced out any of the bad that was destined to come my way. Maybe I just have to be happy in knowing I made someone else’s day a little better, and post my good deed all over my facebook so that everyone knows what a good person I am.?* Okay. I’ll take it. Works for me. God knows that if I had instead chosen to take the wallet and all the cash, I would have lost a limb in a freak tunnel mishap on the drive home. I’ll definitely take an un-bad day over that.

*At the time of press, Jennifer was up to 14 Facebook "likes", (the virtual form of pats on the back) for her good deed.