Ope Pardon, No. 9: Turning 30

Greetings! I'm back. Sort of.

I wrote about a thousand words yesterday, some thoughts I'd been jotting down for the last couple months, on turning 30 this week.

I referenced Bo Burnham's devastating "Turning 30" and my beef with his assertion that when he was 27, he was building birdhouses and not directing the award-winning Eighth Grade.

I talked about how I have felt 30 for at least a year now, ever since the pandemic curb-stomped my social life and I've been too lazy and constitutionally incapable of rebuilding it to the level of a 20something.

How if I'm being honest, I'm ready for my 30s. I'm in a pretty good place vis-a-vis my hopes and dreams and while the way I piece together the puzzle of my Maslowian needs might not be the way I want to forever, they are all being sufficiently met.

How I would not feel any impulse to navel-gaze about the whole occasion at all if I could simply turn 30 without having a 30th birthday because it's not the passage of time that gives me anxiety, it's the inability to reconcile my significant dislike for public attention with my equally significant desire for meaningful recognition, something opting out of celebrating my birthday has never effectively solved plus people still ask, especially when you're turning 30, what you're doing for your birthday in a way that my stupid brain laces with judgment, and becoming a Jehovah's Witness doesn't feel like an option at this point because none of the people in my life are Jehovah's Witnesses so I would still be asked the question plus I really, really love celebrating other people's birthdays — truly just one of my very favorite things — so I certainly don't want to do away with the institution altogether.

But in any case, I didn't like what I wrote, or how I wrote it. So I scrapped it because the whole point of this exercise is for me to write for fun and only post things I'm (mostly) proud of.

Ultimately, I didn't feel like I had anything meaningful to say about 30 and also you could not pay me to write about Will Smith this week.

That said, my Notes app is full of other ideas and I have two 7-hour train rides coming up so expect me to be back on my bullshit in the coming weeks.

More soon.