Thirty is Emphatically Not the New Twenty.

This is my attempt at blogging. I've pondered starting an actual website but I thought I'd begin with this and see where it goes. I used to blog quite frequently on my Myspace page. But no one is really on that site anymore and the format was a bit rudimentary for my tastes. Yes my nose is sticking up in the air as I type that.

So let's begin, shall we? I recently turned 30. I truly believed that nothing would change except my driver's license on my birthday (and that I'd acquire copious amounts of presents) but I was gravely mistaken. I thought I'd wake up the next morning and still want to play World of Warcraft, I thought my memory would be the same, I thought I wouldn't feel older at all. I know some will accuse me of hyperbole but the weeks after my birthday have been plagued with memory problems, cracking knees, and I've hardly played WoW at all. I can't remember the last time I sat down and did the daily quests or even ran a dungeon. I've actually contemplated starting crossword puzzles and learning how to knit. But for all the MMORPG's I'm not playing I do have a lovely flower garden to show for it.

What troubles me is the expediency of the aging process. It didn't help my mental state when my Grandma told me that at 30 your body stops producing enough calcium. She recommended that I take two 500 mg tablets of calcium per day. I'm sure more recommendations will be forthcoming now that I seem to have crossed the threshold into what I call preventative death measures (pdm). It's all about maintenance now. Making sure I don't end up with chalk bones and broken limbs.

As for my memory. There is a noticeable lag in my brain. I used to banter and bicker quite effectively. Now there is a significant pause in my responses. I can feel the neurons exerting themselves to form into some sort of answer. I'm wondering if it's this bad at 30 what will I be like at 40? Will minutes pass instead of seconds? Will people look at me and wonder why I'm not speaking? Will they just leave me standing there, in the rain (rain fits the imagery of this moment), and hours later I find the words to say?

I was assured by a good friend of mine (who had turned 30 about two months before me) that I had nothing to worry about. In fact I have textual evidence to support this assertion. I literally have a text from her that says, "30 is great". I carried those words around in my little heart, they bolstered me, they made me get out of bed in the morning. The reality, however, falls far short of great. Tony the Tiger would give it just a grrr. No additional letters or an exclamation point. Just grrr. Thirty, quite frankly, sucks ass. Yes, I said it. It sucks ass. I think there has been a whole campaign waged to make people feel like 30 is the new 20. If I followed the money trail it'd probably lead back to the companies who make money off of Appletinis. Don't ask me why, I don't have it all worked out yet. It has something to do with the emergence of the Appletini coinciding with the 30 is the new 20 b.s.

As I sit here with my bones flaking off into my body, worrying that bone shards will push through my skin at night, causing me to bleed to death, I recall better times. Days without two calcium pills a day, spending endless hours at online gaming and retorting at the speed of sound. Indeed, 30 is not the new 20, it is the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship April, welcome to my blog.