dir/newschool/rant: I   t u r n   t h i r t y

On Friday August ninth I turn thirty. Scary. I am in turmoil, not so much from turning thirty but from turning my life around. Of course turning thirty has it's significance, the thought of leaving my twenties terrifies me. When you are in your twenties you can do whatever the fuck you want. You can blow, screwup or just do nothing with your life. That's how it works out right? You spend your adolescense not appreciating your freedom, you waste your teenage years in angst and then you are suddenly in your twenties and it's your game, you have to do whatever it takes to live your life the way you want to live it. I spent much of my twenties in a funk, blowing money and doing shit like buying toys, spending too much time at Target and being in fucked up relationships and now tomorrow looms large.

I will go to work, I will hear well wishes from people I work with, questions about why I would ever think to spend my birthday at work and then I will rush home to prepare for a evening of preparations. I'd like to go see xXx, I think Van Diesel is damn sexy and motherfucking cool. I'd like to have some sushi, a ritual I perform every birthday. I'd maybe even like to hang close with some friends. My thirtieth and my impending sense of mortality, make this a strange time. I usually spend my birthday either in the hands of friends or in a relationship. I will do both on Saturday evening and I hope to see a number of people from the old school as they mingle with my new school chums.

2002 has been an interesting year. My relationship with my girlfriend has been an up and down affair, as we have tried to move from living together for more then two years to a healthy relationship. A great portion of my silence has been in fact because so much of my life has been either personal or relationship related. Work on the movie continues at a brisk slow pace, but I feel like it will pick up. My job is moving along briskly, as the recession kicks in, I find myself committing more and doing more. I love my job, I'd like to keep it, I'd hate to jump in the ranks of unemployed. For three solid years I waffled about whether I would call my job home or if I would seek something else. Home it is.

Over the summer my health has been called shitty by my presiding physicians, had I seen them before this summer they would have told me the same thing. I spent my twenties in this fatalistic "fuckit" mindset of: "I will survive my twenties and do more or I will not and fuck it" This philosophy only works in life if you do in fact make a stopping point for when you say you will stop. I chose thirty as my stopping time. So for the last year and a half I've been trying to undo my roaring twenties and the progress on that is going well. Things are definitely changing in my life, my health is looking up as are my finances.

For the longest I wanted "it" to be over. I wasn't sure what "it" was, but I know I wanted to be more mature then to live the rest of my life doing "it". Now, I am on a mission. I want to go to Japan, I want to see Australia, travel to Mexico, take a cruise and pay shit loads of money to sleep in a closet and have fun on the high seas. Enough of my time has been spent in mourning. I am an unwed widow to the memory of a friend and all the shit I ever fucked up. Tomorrow I ditch that and tomorrow I am new man. I can't say this is a proclamation or some aspiration or resolution, it's just the light behind the cocoon, I'm not sure how everything will shake out and I have not tried to do the sabotaging math to figure it out. I'll truly try living life, rather then mathematically figuring out it's probable outcomes.

But all of that is the grind. Up here, rattling and tearing through my skull I am struggling with a melancholy. Of course I want more in the wake of what was my twenties, not the fame fortune thing or happiness but at least a significantly reduced amount of sadness. I do not expect to be a joyous person, it is not a role I've ever picked up with abandon, but I do love and cherish life more. I want to breathe and live it.

part two