Aging and other things

It's my birthday tomorrow, which means that in one more day I'm going to be 39. Thirty fucking nine!

I could ask how this happened, but then I'm sure someone would leave a comment for me explaining about the earth's annual rotation around the sun, etc, so let's just assume I've asked such a rhetorical question and move on, shall we?

I've also just noticed that my 200th blogging post was about 17 posts ago, so so such much for celebrating that.

I'd also made plans to throw a spectacularly boozy and debauched party to celebrate my last gasp of being 30-something, to which all my favourite bloggers were going to be invited, as well as my real-world friends: a grand union of the virtual and the physical, but what with one thing and another, the weeks got away from me in the same way that the last 39 years have, and I haven't organised a thing.

That said, if anyone feels like dropping into Wally's bar on Saturday morning around 2am, I reckon there's a good chance I'll be propping up the bar and yacking with the staff. If I am, buy me a drink, will you? ;-)

So, 39 hey? By this age my parents already had two teenaged children. I just have expensive proclivities. Weird. I know there's no point in comparing myself to my parents, but sometime I can't stop using them as a yardstick for my own growth and development.

There's always my sister too, I suppose, who's a bit more conservative than me. When she was 39, which wasn't long ago at all, given that she's only two years older than me, she also had two children, as well as a newly established teaching career (having previously worked as a chef, a public servant, and several other careers). Oh yeah, plus a husband and a dog. In comparison, I have a large list of local restaurants who home deliver.

Family similarities and differences apart, let me think about being 39 for just a moment.

Most of my old friends, the ones I've known since I moved to Melbourne from Moe, have become extremely settled by now. They either have kids or mortgages, and for most of them, their idea of a big night out is one glass of wine too many at a dinner party and getting to bed at 1am. I still love them, though, but my idea of a big night out involves not getting to bed at all until sometime the following day or night.

I don't know if I ever made a concious decision to grow old disgracefully, but that's the way things seem to have played out.

I'm on the threshold of turning 39, but I don't feel it (except occasionally after afore-mentioned big nights out, when I feel every heavy second of my many days on this planet weighing me down and moving off the couch seems an absolute impossibility).

My mental picture of myself, if there is such a thing, seems to be stuck resolutely around 27 (albeit with a little less hair, which is now its natural colour, mostly silver, rather than a lurid blue, green or pink that changes every couple of weeks, as it used to be at that age).

Maybe it's because I'm gay, and don't have the responsibilities of raising kids of my own, that has helped keep me feeling (and hopefully acting) younger than I am? Actually I don't think that's it at all, as I have several gay friends my age or older who have settled down (mostly settled, anyway, with the occasional mad night of fun).

What the point of this post is I don't know, but hell, writing it down beats muttering madly to myself on the tram, that's for sure.

I might save that sort of thing for when I'm 80.