Thirty and a day

Now that I've recovered from the anticlimactic horror of entering my third decade -- everyone reminding me that it's technically my thirty-first year can please hush the f*ck down -- I can sit back and catch my breath. Dressed, I might add, in a very geriatric-appropriate get-up of yellowed white T-shirt, grey underpants and black socks.

"So how does it feel?"

Honestly, I was too preoccupied with a zit on the right side of my face -- the result of my habit-of-late of letting my beard grow out on the weekends, only this was an especially long weekend, which meant more beard, which meant more clogged hair pores -- which started out as a little nothing but, once I'd had at it with my fingernails, razorblade and tweezers, ended up as a Big Something.........this sentence has lost it's grammatical sensibility. In short, though, I was too preoccupied with this aforementioned blemish to really notice how it felt to turn thirty. Plus my left foot, which seems to have a torn tendon from Saturday's yoga class. Plus some ongoing GI tract troubles. And a lingering cold.

So I guess thirty feels pretty much like twenty-nine felt. Which is to say, pretty much like I'm a ninety year old obsessive compulsive hypochondriac narcissist stuck in the body of a twenty-nine year old who sits on the couch at night dressed like a seventy year old.

Things that have made this transition somewhat easier:

1. M. threw me a surprise party on Saturday night. Better yet, a surprise party which was actually surprising. This is due partly to M.'s and associated others' skillful secrecy and planning, and partly to my friend Miriam's skillful manipulation of my insecurity and fear of humiliation (Me: "I dunno, I think M. might be having a surprise party for me." Miriam: "I think you'd better stop before you embarrass yourself."). A surprise party is something for which I have always longed, and now that M. has gone and thrown me my first and only, he has won my heart for good and I am forever his love slave. It was also a chance for some of our friends to commingle with some of our (my) family, which I think went well, and which has given me hope that I will be able to hug and kiss and perhaps dance with M. in front of my parents without fainting or vomiting.

2. We received our Very First wedding gifts. A toaster, which we desperately needed, and a waffle iron, which we desperately wanted, even if it will spend most of its time sandwiched on a shelf between the fondue set which we also once desperately wanted and, God willing, a chicken pot which one of us once obsessed about to the point of making an unfortunate wedding guest feel obliged to procure for Him if only for the purpose of not having to hear Him ask for it one more time. Receiving our first wedding gifts was nothing short of exciting. As M. remarked, because he's a diehard romantic and I'm his love slave and he can never again say or do wrong, "Wow, getting this toaster makes the wedding feel so much more real."

3. While we're on the subject, the chicken pot has been brought down from $240 to $199 in less than two months. Which means that in four months, if my math is right, it will cost a little under a dollar, which means that Someone and Someone will have the most unique, most cast ironiest wedding favors ever.

4. I can now put together a relatively lame and incomplete List on my weblog and not feel badly about it, because thirty year old ninety year olds tire easily, and have limited reserves of creativity which they need to set aside for devising new healthy bowel regimens.

In other news, check this guy out -- special attention to his Letters to Star Jones -- whom I just discovered and find to be particularly dang funny.

In more alarming news, it dawned on me yesterday -- I forget if it was when I was tearing my right cheek apart, or preparing my Metamucil -- that my mother had me not when she was thirty-six, as I have always had it in my head, but when she was thirty-four. I've always figured that as long as I had my first child by the time I was as old as my mother was when she had her last child (i.e. me), I'd be an adequately young and limber parent. Now that I've got two years less to work with, and given the apparently extensive preparation and waiting time inherent in gay parenting, I am left with the unfortunate necessity of having to multitask at my wedding, which will now be held either in China or a back alley egg bank.