30

[This is a backdated post] 

Well, I turned 30 on Wednesday and there seems to have been some kind of bureaucratic stuff up.

I haven't received my No Really, You're An Adult Now, 18 Was Just A Test Run, 21 Was Just Another Excuse For A Party, And Your 20s Didn't Count Properly Because You Weren't Really Paying Attention information packet hasn't arrived in the mail.

The manual it's supposed to contain would come in really handy right now because I still feel a bit like an impostor sometimes.

Things that I do that are grown up:

• I have a job
• I pay taxes
• And fill out forms about taxes*
• I vote
• I drive a car
• I pay for registration and insurance for that car
• I have health insurance
• I donate money to charity
• I make my own dentist and doctor appointments etc
• I pay bills
• I organise my finances
• I buy groceries
• I cook real food for myself

Things that I do that seem to invalidate the 'no really, you're an adult' thing:

• Watch a bunch of animated shows (all Venture Bros, Archer, Harvey Birdman, Futurama etc all the time)
• Read comic books
• Spend time at work imagining Looney Toons-level karma happening to the people who still act like they're in high school despite being over 40
• Eat pizza for breakfast
• Eat ice cream for dinner
• Say 'ugh, whaaaaaaaaaat?' before answering the phone at work
• Spend hours imagining what it would mean for the human race if we were no longer the apex predator on the planet and whether this would make us better people or huger assholes and whether this would be a parallel reality or some kind of nuclear event or an alien invasion that put these 'bigger/smarter/more dangerous than us' predators into the mix...

The thing is, all those items on the second list may not be refined or 'mature' but what they really are is 'things that you're free to do now because you're in charge of yourself - i.e. a grown up'.

Things that maybe all adults are still doing** even though they are also sometimes going to plays or art galleries or wearing glasses unironically and looking like they have their shit together.

The magical 'moment of clarity where you know exactly what is going on and you feel like a legit figure of authority' isn't coming, is it?
Or it'll sneak up on me so slowly that I'll not even notice it's arrived until some time later.

So when I was a kid and I was running up to my parents and aunts and uncles who were about how old I am now and asking them to take care of things and explain things and fix things, they felt the same way I feel know when my nephew or my friends' kids run up to me***?

Well, that's a bit terrifying retrospectively.

I never feel particularly mature or ambitious or whatever.

At least until I meet people who are technically old enough to vote but seem like maybe they shouldn't be allowed to...

 

There's some stuff I'm still planning to get around to that 20-year-old me would have assumed I would have done by 30 because 30 is soooooooo ooooooold and soooooo faaaaar aaaawaaaaaaay but there aren't any things that I really regret doing or any specific opportunities that I feel I missed or passed on that I shouldn't have.

I didn't really have a 'things to do before you're 30' list because those kind of things always make me want to yell 'YOU'RE NOT THE BOSS OF ME! AND ALSO ALL YOUR IDEAS ARE STUPID!'

So here I am, older, probably a bit wiser, eating doughnuts at midnight because I'm a motherhugging adult.

*Ugh, paperwork.

**Or whatever their personal equivalent is. Gardening is totally the grown up version of playing in the mud.

***Which is 'Well, I think I can work this out but stop looking at me as if I am McGyver/Santa!'

A Life Wasted?

My father recently turned 60 and as a surprise for him, my sister and I put together a couple of photo-boards to display at his birthday party.

We sat down and went through our entire family cache of photos, picked out any photo of sufficient quality that featured Dad, scanned it, had it printed out and added it to the board.

They went down a treat with the family, especially the photos which hadn't been seen in decades and which they'd forgotten.

They were a major talking point and had clusters of people hanging about them for the entire duration of the party.

I was really pleased to have played a part in their creation and giving everyone a chance to reminisce and giggle at what my father used to look like and get up to but it also made me realise something.

I have straight up been wasting my life.

Flicking through the photos of myself so far it was absolutely clear to me that I have not anywhere near been living up to my potential or exploring all the opportunities available to me.

When I saw the pictures of my mother and all the incarnations of her glorious hair...

I have been rocking the same handful of hairstyles for my entire life, none of which seem particularly evocative of their time period or make me look outlandishly different from year to year.

In the photos I found of my mother she sported:

• A magnificent curly afro
• A sleek long bob with matching fringe
• A mane of hair down to her bum
• Charlie's Angels flicky hair
• The obligatory 80s perm
• A cute curly shoulder-length do with a sideways swept fringe
  
• Her current pixie cut

Anyone in the future looking to catalogue my life and reviewing my photos up until now will be barfing to themselves in quiet boredom over the uniform monotony of my hair.

There have been a few changes but none so striking and the biggest changes have been the occasional shift in hue.

I know there are reasons for this...

• my laziness
• the unpredictable and willful nature of my follicles
• the fact that most of the hairstyles that have been 'fashionable' during my hairstyling years have been almost unfailingly terrible *coff Jennifer Aniston coff*

... but I still feel that I'm letting future biographers or possible descendents down by not offering a full catalogue of wild and wonderful photo material for them to pore over.

Even my father has sported a wider range of dos - though admittedly some of them were on his face.

The question now is, is it too late for me?

Am I too set in my boring hair ways?

Are there any dos that will be considered as time-bound and awesome as those that preceded the 90s?

Could I have taken a less superficial message from almost a century of family photos*?

Maybe I could have, maybe I could have...



*Out of interest we went all the way back through photos that featured the younger incarnations of our grandparents and great-grandparents too.