Okay, so maybe it’s only been 30 years, but the joke doesn’t really work without the “hundred.” And for the record, I don’t care what you think. It’s my birthday and l will make as many terrible literary puns as I please.
Thirty years old. Damn. Just think of all the sandwiches I’ve eaten in that time. It’s kind of humbling.
Nevertheless, I know that I’m supposed to make a big deal out of this milestone. In particular, I’m expected to bitch about leaving my twenties behind and wind up crying into a Mai Tai during a “dirty thirty” party, but to be honest I’m getting too old for that sort of nonsense. I had that crisis after my 26th birthday, back when I learned the bitter truth that I was finally in the declining years of the party decade. It was a realization that came when my hangovers abruptly stopped practicing and seriously started to knuckle down. Those raw, terrible mornings portended a bleak vision of my future, a downhill lie of pain and misery and dry heaving. Clearly, life was only going to get worse, and 30 was the jagged cliff yawning over the maw of hell that is old age.
Which is a notion I still believe to be fundamentally sound; I’ve just gotten used to the idea. Besides, I have no regrets about leaving my twenties behind now, despite the fact that I’ll never fit into that prom dress again. Twenty-something me was an oblivious, egotistical, and ignorant bastard, and if it was possible I would claw my way through time and space to kick some sense into that little shit. He could learn a lot from the older, wiser, ignorant son of a bitch I am today.
For instance, I could urge him to be extra careful around nail guns in the future, or to not fall down that sailboat hatch in 2007. I could tell him that maybe a Classical Studies degree wasn’t the best way to spend a college scholarship. I could even gently let slip that the girl he was seeing was actually his second cousin, and that he should probably break it off before it got weird, and especially before that scandalizing harpy broke his heart.
Not that younger me would listen, or that it would make much difference. I would just end up doing something else completely inane to balance out the cosmos. No, I have accepted that the mistakes I’ve made were a necessary condition of my development, and have resolved to look forward to future failures as learning experiences, and not the painful missteps that they actually will be. I am nothing if not an optimist.
In fact, I think my perpetually sunny disposition is what makes this birthday so easy to handle. That, or the fact that I’ve lived most of my life as a miserly, cranky old man already, and I just consider old age to be like an overlarge suit that I’ll eventually grow into. Even now, I am looking forward to my sixtieth birthday, when I can reminisce and mock the idiot that I am today with rueful scorn.
Of course, one of the greatest things about living in this, our modern age, is that I will readily see 60. Hell, I’ve got a fighting chance of making it past 80. Did you know that the mostly likely thing to kill me right now is getting into my truck and dying in a car crash? Number two is suicide. How great is that? A hundred years ago it would have been tuberculosis and diptheria. To consider that the most lethal circumstances I face today are completely voluntary activities is an incredible achievement in the history of our species. Simply the fact that most of us will die when our hearts eventually explode from over-eating(!) high-fat, carbohydrate-rich crap is a triumph of humankind, although probably not one that’s going to be carved into a granite monument. Maybe into a butter sculpture, though.
And as long as we’re talking statistics, did you know that my heart has beat around 37,869,120 times in the 946,684,800 seconds that have passed since my birth? Or how in that same time, the population of the earth has increased by 2,435,661,573 people and the solar system itself has traversed a staggering 129,844,548,628 miles on its circuit around the Milky Way? Not bad for 10, 957 days.
Even more impressive than that is the manner in which I found those numbers. The creation and ubiquitous adoption of the Internet has been the biggest story of my lifetime, and has had such a profound effect upon technology and society that it is increasingly difficult to recall how we ever got along without it. The ease with which we have incorporated it into our lives is a testament to its power. Simply the fact that you are reading this, which I wrote, edited, and published in the ether, would have been nothing short of miraculous thirty years ago. That change, so pervasive and so complete, is what the history books call a paradigm shift. Before us, the world has seen the development of agriculture, the creation of the printing press, the Copernican Revolution, but today, finally, we have unbridled, instantaneous access to the collective wisdom of our planet, and more importantly, hundreds of videos of cats getting their heads stuck in things. It is indeed an astonishing and awe-inspiring moment in human affairs.
Furthermore, we have accomplished many other feats in the past 30 years beyond creating a ruthlessly effective means of procrastination. Even in the last decade alone, we have quietly upended many hallowed principles and have charted brand new territory in understanding the world and our place in it. For example, we now know that:
- Ancient humans interbred with Neanderthals. That certainly explains my brow ridge.
- Some dinosaurs were warm blooded, and many were covered in feathers.
- We’ve found over 700 extrasolar planets, some lying within the habitable zone of their stars.
- We can directly edit our genetic code. I am looking forward to a set of gills in the future.
- Reason and emotion are not separate mental faculties, but are intimately interconnected.
- Japanese scientists will clone a mammoth within the decade; here’s hoping they’ll do a giant sloth after that.
If those aren’t reasons for celebrating my birthday, then I don’t know what is.
In the end, I’m happy to be turning 30. Being alive in the twenty-first century is an incredibly rare thing in this world, and I am grateful to be able to see it. When I was younger, I used to wax philosophic about being born a generation or century too late, but I was blithely ignoring exactly how remarkable it is that I was alive at all. Which, coincidentally, is how I feel about bemoaning the injustice of your departing twenties. Get over it. The world is not coming to an end. Everyone knows that happens when you turn 40.
So I will have a party after all, and a Mai Tai or three, but you won’t find me crying. I will instead be raising my little umbrella cocktail glasses high in salute of 30 years well lived, and drinking toasts to the next 30 yet to come.
I will curse the day I was born come tomorrow morning, though.