Birthdays

I'm hitting somewhat of a milestone tomorrow.  I mean, I guess it's a milestone. I'm turning 30.  From what I've heard it's not much different from 29, except you might be clicking a different radio button on the surveys you take.  Then again, I've heard that's more often at 35 as well, so maybe I shouldn't worry about it too much. Surprisingly, being born on April Fool's day, I have experienced few, if any, memorable pranks on my birthday. It's to the point where I think of it as my birthday first, and a joke holiday second.

I don't like getting older. I'm not sure anyone does. I had to get my car out of a ditch during the winter and did something to my back.  It hurt horribly for two weeks and then was okay, but it gets sore a lot faster than it used to if I'm sitting for long periods of time, like at work. I've been getting grey hairs for several years now, and while I don't see any signs of baldness, I worry that it's going to start soon.  More than anything when I look in the mirror, I see my dad. No offense dad, but it's a bit frightening.

Speaking of my parents, one of the neater things about our ages is that we're just about 20 years apart.  So they've just turned 50, which is a much bigger milestone than 30 in my opinion. And of course that brings up the fact that when they were my age, I was turning 10, and my sister would have been 5.  I cannot imagine having a 10 year old and a 5 year old right now. Well, I guess I can, but it would make things so much different.  I do want kids, and I had planned to have at least one before I was 30, but things don't always work out as you plan. Take my career for example.

I finished college with an accounting and business admin degree.  They're very lucrative degrees. Accounting is rarely not in demand. Every business on the planet needs an accountant, and money pretty much runs the world, so I'm pretty secure in my ability to find jobs.  Even when times are tough. In fact, accountants are probably even more in demand when there's no money to manage, because the hardest thing to do is run a company with no money. I should know, I've been doing it for two years now. It's still just a job to me though. I suppose everyone fantasizes about finding a job doing something they love.  Then it doesn't feel like a job.  I don't think accounting can ever be like that for me. I'm trying to figure out what I could do that wouldn't feel like work, and that I have the skills to make money at.

If I tell people older than me that I'm turning 30, they make joking comments about how that's still young.  If I talk about being 30 with people younger than me, they jokingly comment about how old I'm getting. It's confusing being stuck in the middle.

If this post makes it seem I'm depressed about turning 30, I'm not.  I'm trying not to attach value to the age at all, other than to say I'm getting older and there are things I want to do with my life that I should either be doing or working towards doing. The last ten years have had a whole lot of changes.  In just terms of places I've lived over the last ten years, I've been in Seattle, Alaska, Tennessee, North Carolina and Boston. I've gotten married, and I've changed jobs three times, which, actually is probably not that much for 10 years for some people. I think the good has outweighed the bad by quite a bit, and if it's any indication of what I have to look forward to in the next 10 years, it means that I have no idea what's going to happen in the next 10 years.  I'm okay with that. I just don't want my back to hurt while I get there.