24

Why yes, I did have a birthday today.
I'm 24 now. Do you realize that 24 is only SIX YEARS away from 30? I got my new drivers license in the mail and when I saw that it expires in 2012 and I realized that I'll be THIRTY in 2012, I had a moment. It's not that I'm worried about 30, exactly. Age is just a number, blah, blah, blah, and honestly, 30 doesn't sound too terribly old to me (not when I can look at my parents, who just turned 50 and are busy running off to Las Vegas five times a year and have greater drinking stamina than I do). It's just that I can so clearly and vividly remember getting my last drivers license six years ago. I was a senior in high school so I went to the DPS before school that morning. It was the day of the Celebrity Waiters Luncheon, this charity event I used to volunteer at every year to get an excused day off from school, and I remember standing with a group of my friends getting ready to carpool over to the luncheon and saying, "Wow, this doesn't expire until 2006! I'll be 24 then!!" And because I was 18, 24 was this impossibly old age, and I never imagined how quickly the time would pass.
But now I know better, and I know I'll be turning 30 like, tomorrow. And that's weird.

It's also weird because my parents got married at 24. Not that I ever imagined I would be married at 24, or even thought I wanted to be married at 24. In fact, I had a whole conversation with my dad today about how crazy he and mom were for getting married so young. But the honest truth is that I also didn't imagine that I'd still be completely single at 24. I want to get married eventually, and I want kids (I know, how many times do you all have to listen to me blab about this?). Because of the whole wanting kids thing, in an ideal world I'd like to get married before I'm 30. Especially because I want kids (plural) and I realize that kids plural is much less likely if you don't even start trying until you're in your mid thirties. I know I have a lot of options for becoming a mother even if I don't get married by 30. I also know that there's a good possibility I have nothing to worry about and when I'm 30 with a crying baby and a cheating husband and I hate my life, you'll all say "Remember how much you thought you wanted this, and how you thought it would never happen!? Haha!" But admit it, at some point in your life you daydreamed an ideal life for yourself. And my ideal daydream involved marriage by 26 or 27. And now that I'm 24 and still very much single, I don't see that happening. I don't see myself suddenly becoming the type of person that can meet a guy and progress to marriage all within the course of just a year or two, and since I'm not that kind of person, my little ideal life schedule is no longer a feasible daydream.

I guess that's what it all boils down to, ultimately. My little "professional career woman settling down to take a few years off and raise a family by thirty" daydream isn't really something that is likely to happen anymore, so I'm having to reconfigure a lot of my dreams.
And that reconfiguring isn't a bad thing, actually. I've spent a lot of time over the past several months imagining things I could do with myself if I do in fact end up Single For Life, and my ideal single life daydream can make me pretty happy, too. The hard thing is that I would like to believe that my ideal single life daydream can be the same thing as my ideal married life daydream if I happen upon the right person, so it's hard to feel like anything I imagine myself doing as a Single For Life isn't settling for second best, somehow. It feels like anything I can do by myself would be even better if I wasn't by myself, you know?

And I hate that I feel that way. I hate it for a lot of reasons. A number 1, I hate it because it's illogical. I look around me and can see that out of all of my friends who are coupled up (and that's the majority of them right now) there are maybe only 2 couples that have the really good, strong, happy relationship that I'd like to have for myself. So I know it's illogical to believe that any relationship in my future is going to make me perfectly happy when probably 90% of the couples I know do not have great relationships. What's the likelihood that any relationship I have would be any different? So why do I persist in feeling like having a committed relationship could make me any happier than I am right now? Statistically, it's more likely to just add a lot of complications, right?
B number 2, the feminist in me HATES IT. A lot of my thesis project has ended up focused on the sexual revolution and the women's liberation movement, and while a lot of the more radical stuff just makes me want to say, "Whoa, chill," I read all these inspiring essays and articles and I'm left wondering what all that passion and rallying and revolution in the 60s was all about if 40 years later I'm sitting on my couch an intelligent, self-sufficient, creative, successful, sexually confident woman knowing exactly how strong and capable I am of being on my own but still whining about how I'm 24 with no prospects for marriage. I mean, what the fuck is that?
I get angry at myself for buying into the marriage hype. I can try to justify it by saying that the need I feel to be with someone and have a baby is a physical need, a primal need, so deep inside of me that I can't remember a time in my life when I didn't feel it. But that need didn't get there by itself. Do you think nature can really be that strong? Because I don't. I know that my "need" is at least half the fault of society, and if we all lived in Transsexual Transylvania or some such place I'd only be worrying about which guy I should sleep with tonight and whether or not I'd look hotter in the black corset or silver sparkly fishnets. That's a silly example, I know, but it's also true.
I guess I just can't shake the marriage dream because there's always the chance I could get lucky. That I could in fact somehow be one of the blessed people that finds someone on this planet that enhances my good points, accepts my bad points, and let's me do the same for him.

But I want to shake that dream. I do. I want to shed the part of me that thinks of marriage and family as the best option and instead I want to see it as just one of many equally terrific options, possibly not even as terrific an option as some of the others. I want to be cool enough to think like that. I'm going to keep working on it, anyway. Do a little mental and emotional deprogramming this year. Yeah. That sounds healthy. And I think it would be beneficial even if my future does end up containing marriage and family anyway.

Anyway. I'm looking forward to 24. I felt some trepidation about being 23. I remember telling Kymberli how 23 is one of my scary years. There's something about the 2 and 3 combination that I don't like. I tried to psych myself up last year but frankly, I was getting a bad vibe from 23 right from the start. And maybe it was a self-fulfilling prophecy, but this has been the first year of my life that wasn't better than or at least as good as the year before. Careerwise I've had a great year. I feel smart and successful right now and that's a good feeling (and a feeling I'm going to enjoy for the next six months because after that who the hell knows what is going to happen). Socially, it has been a pretty good year, too. It started out kind of slowly and for the majority of last winter and early spring I still felt like my best friends were elsewhere and Austin was just full of acquaintances for the most part (before you even say anything, Matthew, you were an exception!). But I finally got really close to some people here over the summer, and then this school year started and brought the new wave of grad students and now I once again feel like I have an awesome core group of friends, friends that know my favorite sex position and the meanest thing I've ever done in my life. You know, things all close friends should know about one another. Haha. So career and money=great, social life=good with a last minute upswing to awesome, but my love life has been pretty damn sucky for most of the year. It started out as confusing, was perfect for about a month (honestly, only about a month...that's all it was...funny how one perfect month can then proceed to screw up the entire rest of the damn year) and then it was just sort of a mess. I'm out of the messy part now, but obviously I'm still figuring things out and ready for a clean start. Here's hoping 24 has that in store.

I feel better about 24 than I did about 23, anyway. Now it just needs to be 2007 because I don't know about you guys, but it seems like 2006 has been a rough year for the majority of people I know. Lots of transitions, lots of sad things. It's gettin' to be clean slate time, don't you think?

So yeah! 24 in 2007! 24/7! Hey, look at that! That's promising. My life is about to take on the characteristics of a convenience store!

And no, my birthday did not totally get lost in all the business this weekend. Rocky opens on Tuesday so I did have to spend the majority of my actual birthday working on my lobby display and watching the dress rehearsal (and oh. my. god. The costumes for this show! They are incredible. We had a guest costume designer and he did some beautiful, crazy things. I was drooling over practically every costume on that stage tonight. I feel inspired to try to make something crazy/gorgeous/slutty and wear it for box office managing on opening night, although in actuality I'll probably chicken out and draw the line at fishnets and hooker boots). But on Friday night Mandi threw a birthday party for me and her boyfriend Jason (we share a birthday). We went barhopping and then back to her house where Richie and I attempted to consume our weight in Jello shots, and Debbie and Mandi did some booty dancing, amongst other things. It was a fun party, and Chelsea and Shane are taking me out for dinner sometime this week, which is very nice of them. So there have been fun birthday celebrations. And the happy birthday phone calls today were interesting, mainly because a couple of people I was positive would remember it was my birthday seemingly almost forgot it, and people I never expected to hear from and hadn't actually heard from in a long time called to say happy birthday. Go figure. In the end I did in fact hear from everyone I feel I "should have", though, plus a few others. So that's fun. I feel loved!

Also, I keep forgetting this fact, but I'm going to Ohio on Thursday for that conference. I won't be back until Sunday and even though I'll have my computer with me I'm kind of doubting I'll have the time or inclination to update this thing. And there's no way I'm updating before Ohio because with Rocky opening this week I don't even think I'll be sleeping, let alone writing.

So expect an update next week, probably something about how this Texan froze her ass off and totally botched her conference panel.

Peace.