Just a Number

This year I turned thirty four.

It's an age I tried not to think about for a long time. I remember sometime, somewhere, maybe high school, maybe just in the vast existence of female-ness in the united states, I learned that women thirty five and older are no longer considered "young".
There was a lot infused into that label too.
I was well into my twenties when the insanely underrated film Kiss Kiss Bang Bang came out but I remember seeing Michelle Monegan's character, gorgeous, confident, total package, correcting Robert Downey Jr's grammar in an LA bar, suddenly distracted by a foxy looking blonde with sinister eyeliner in the corner. I'm paraphrasing here, but she basically derides the woman to Jr by saying something along the lines of "I can't believe she's thirty five and still trying to make it as an actress in hollywood."
Of course Jr unblinkingly replies with, "And how old are you?"
Monegan bats her eyelashes coquettishly and sips at her drink before responding. "I'm thirty four. I'm a baby."

That scene stuck with me. Not only because she was just so fucking cool in it, but because it epitomizes the obsession with youth and beauty and the value of women as a cultural norm. Even while she is kind of acknowledging the ludicrous system, she's also buying into it, big time, and that's how I see oh I don't know, EVERY SINGLE INTELLIGENT WOMAN I KNOW RESPONDING TO IT.
It's not cool to acknowledge that getting older scares you unless you're twenty two and it's basically hilarious to everyone except you. It is however, cool to acknowledge that you are getting older, but you bear none of the trappings of your age. For example, you not only look a solid decade younger than what it says on your drivers license, but you know all the current media and pop and news obsessions without being too invested in any of them. You're tech savvy but not tech dependent, and you constantly joke about how behind the times you are while on the most current updated version of the the "app du jour".
You are painstakingly aware of the most recent hairstyles and fashion trends, but you always twist them to your own personal style, which you've obviously established since you're almost thirty? just turned thirty? thirty-ish? Hahaha, you laugh with a toss of your no-gray unless it's applied by a salon and only in a balayage ombre effect hair, as you deftly avoid the question.

You've probably noticed, like me that there's a great deal of bad news floating around. War, starvation, animal torture, massacres, violence, and horrifically backwards prejudice and injustice to name just a few. In response to this almost daily barrage of negativity, the social media controlled by the little guy is all about positivity and inclusion and love.

There's body positivity, LGBTQ activism and rights, race equality newsfeeds, motherhood support groups, and all kinds of sites, grams, and the like devoted to embracing everyone's differences and encouraging us to love ourselves for our individuality and our quirks or "flaws" which, back when I was in high school, would have gotten you laughed at and ostracized.
There's even a movement for childless, single women to be allowed to not think of themselves as broken! Whddayaknow!?

It's all very well and good, but where is the inclusion for the aging children of the 80's, who, while technically defined as Millennials, carry with them a great deal of the overbearing, unrelenting ageism of that era.
We're too young to identify with the Generation X'ers who are, in their forties, suddenly realizing they don't give a damn what the kids think of their Green Day patches and their sagging nose rings, but we're too old (and frankly too educated) to buy into the bubblegum, hyper positive, pastel everything twenty somethings.

I realized the other day that instagram is the last social media app I downloaded to my phone, and it might be the last one I download for good. I have no interest in Snapchat (or, Jeez even Snapchat's kind of old, what is everyone on right now? Vine is dead...What's next?), Pokemon Go, or whatever everyone's communicating on right now.
I realized about four years ago, when I cancelled my cable and just surrendered to the voluptuous library of netflix that I would no longer have any idea what the Kardashians were doing, nor would I know whether Justin Bieber or Drake had a new album, or who the next big thing was and why they were so big.

It was the best, most grown up decision I have made in my thirties.

I realized I never liked pop music, but I had been force-fed it, along with a diet of commercials and brand placement to the point where I had a vast repertoire of music, celebrities, television shows, and pretend-a-news taking up valuable real estate in my brain.

About six months ago, at my office, I overheard a couple of people discussing a reality program I had never heard of called "Naked Dating" or something. After a second or two I had to clap my hands over my mouth to keep from hooting in disbelief. A television show, where people go out on blind dates NAKED?! What humiliation porn is this? I have nightmares like that!

I see how I am out of the loop in a lot of things just by making that decision.
I don't watch television when it first comes out. And guess what? With some graceful social media sidestepping, I don't see the spoilers, and so when I order seven discs of Game of Thrones, I wallow in it just as happily two or three years behind you who breathlessly kept up with every episode as it came to HBO.

I am also getting more confident in my thirties. I'm confident that I've lived enough and learned enough to back up my choices. I don't balk when people question a decision I've made because I didn't make that decision based on either the thing that my best friend told me she was doing, or what that news segment on E television told me EVERYONE is doing now.

I don't listen to podcasts.
Yeah.
I know.
But I am a visual learner, and I cannot pay attention to talk radio or audiobooks either, so why even bother? I tried a couple of times, and about seven minutes into whatever I was listening to, I was always thinking about something else, or wishing I was reading.

I'm okay with it.

And I guess I have to get okay with thirty five and up too.
Because it's coming.
The big thing that I keep reminding myself in my ageism soaked brain is that someday, I will look back at my thirties and they will seem how my late teens and early twenties seem to me now: a precious time that I was at my physical and mental best that I wasted fretting about what was going to happen next.

I know there is a lot of pressure to buy a house at my age, to start a family if I haven't, to start saving for retirement, upgrade my wardrobe, get healthy, etc etc, but the truth is, I still have a lot of time ahead of me, and that includes time spent making a whole host of mistakes.

I have yet to regret doing anything in the order I have done it so far.
I got married at twenty seven and waited six years before having a kid. I waited a decade after graduating from college to get my master's, and I no longer buy clothing at Forever 21.

I collect postcards because I love physical representations of the traveling I and my friends have done.

I don't wear a ton of make up, but I can do a decent eyeliner wing if I need to, and I recently figured out how to do it while holding a twenty two lb baby on my hip, so that's impressive.

I am thirty four and a half, and I could stare down the barrel of thirty five, and that ascension to the next age bracket on the census, but I'd rather look at the many age brackets I have ahead of me, and think about what I can do now, so that when I am in the one furthest to the right, I look back at all the others and admire all the insanely awesome cool things I did in my thirties, forties, and fifties, and adjust my nosering proudly as I check off the box marked 60+ and wink to my herrband next to me as I say, "Sixty-four? I'm a baby."