Pushing 30

This summer my friend Natasha and I decided to celebrate our birthdays, which are only a few days apart with a special date night at a romantic French restaurant. We sat on the patio and both had lamb and chocolate soufflés. We split the most delicious bottle of wine, the name of which I can’t recall and while it wasn’t exactly how I dreamed of testing out the place, Nat was as hot of a date as any and we had a great time. That is until she had the audacity to say that we were “pushing 30”. To which I covered my ears, hummed and finally cried, “Shut your dirty, dirty mouth!”

I realize that I am by no means approaching death but I am, however, officially in my late 20’s and that is freaking my shit out. Particularly because I am having serious career issues, have no love life to speak of, my friends are all getting married and dare I say, breeding, and the closest thing that I have to a loving relationship is with my newly adopted, blind, obese, herpes-ridden cat.

My birthday, which took place mid-July, was one of levity and anguish. I mean, what says, “Happy Birthday Old Ass” more than getting birthday spanked by a biker gang. Once worse – having your mother provoke the whole thing.

My wonderful family met up at Les Bourgeois Vineyards in Rocheport for an impromptu birthday celebration in my honor – a fantastic idea if it wasn’t for the fact that the wine drinking started at 1pm.

We are a loud bunch even when we are sober, which isn’t too often (see issue number 11) so we shouldn’t have been concerned when a biker gang decided to split our pavilion. Somehow we thought they would be the ones to cause a raucous. HA.

How I went from boisterous conversations at the table with my aunts, to taunting the biker men who happened to be from my home town, to agreeing (under duress, mother’s insistence, liquid courage/stupidity and a $20/person donation) to let the bikers give me a birthday spanking, I will never know.

I made sure to get mine though. Every turn deserves another. Plus their wives said if they were going to be smacking ass then they had to sacrifice their own behinds in return.

Needless to say by the time we made it to my godmother’s house for the BBQ, I was a hot mess. A sad, sappy hot mess. This is why drinking large amounts of wine is never a good idea. There is a country song that says, “Tequila makes her clothes fall off.” Well they need to have a song that says, “Chardonnay makes her cry and call daddy.” But I guess that is probably not as catchy.

I am not sure exactly what I blubbered about and luckily my father and step-father, who got stuck with round two, didn’t remind me but I am pretty sure it had something to do with me deciding not to take a partial scholarship to grad school at NYU, instead staying, lost and confused in the mid-west. I cried and cried until eventually I passed out on the couch, unaware of the party still going on.

The next day I woke up in time to say goodbye to the family before meeting up with my best friend and my god-daughter for an actual birthday, birthday brunch. Somehow I don’t feel like I am sending the right message to her when I am so hung over I can barely help her color her menu.

The real kicker of the weekend, however, was the bus ride back home. I had decided to take public transportation so I could ride down with my aunt and still be able to see Erica and Maddy. Clearly, I had not thought the trip through. Not in the departure time, which was an hour later than I had thought. Not in my wardrobe, which was a halter sun dress that much to the delight of the man across the aisle from me, left everything exposed as I curled up in the fetal position in my seat, drooling during an uncomfortable sleep on the way home. And not in the bus terminal, which was not across the street from my loft as I expected but 12 blocks south and 10 blocks east on Troost. Luckily, I realized in route that I had left my keys in my aunt’s car and my poor uncle had to leave a BBQ he was throwing to come pick me up.

Lesson here people? I am getting far too old for this shit. Getting spanked by bikers and flashing transients is not appropriate 28 year old behavior and a traumatic birthday is no excuse.

I might be getting old but I still have some growing up to do and hopefully I will have it all figured out by the time I turn 29.

But I am not counting on it.

So What is a Fixer Upper?

Let me preface this whole thing by saying that titling one’s self a “Fixer Upper” is in no way a personal slam.  Look at it like this - we could all use a little work, it is just a matter of how we address our, well, let’s just call them ‘less than desirable’ attributes.

In life we might be quick to see the fantastic foundation or great architectural lines of a Pre-War Colonial but if its shabby shutters were on our person instead of our prime fixer upper property, we would write it off so fast we wouldn’t even have a chance to explore inside.

There is something exciting, rejuvenating, validating even, about finding a project that requires some serious elbow grease and digging in full heartedly.  

I suppose I could have gotten into another home improvement project but I have decked out my 900 square foot loft about as much as it can get. (However, I will get it on Apartment Therapy if it kills me.)

No, this time my focus needs to be about doing a little personal renovation, starting with the inside out.

You see, I used to have this blog and well, people read it.  Not a ton of people but enough to make me nervous about admitting authorship in my mid-size metro.  One thing led to another, details of which I will save for another time, and I decided to kill the thing.  Imagine my surprise when that pissed people off.  (You would have thought with all that heat that one of those darn publishers would have bought my book on the topic, but again, we’ll get to that later.)

It has been a few months since I have written anything at all and I was feeling a bit lost and a bit lost for material.

“Writer’s Block,” I said.

“Bullshit,” my shrink, Jamie said.   Jamie provides me with copious amounts of fodder, not hat I would ever tell her that.  I was beyond relieved when she then told me that she had never read a blog in her life and decide I would promptly begin documenting our sessions in detail.  “It is time you kick your own ass.”

Um…ouch?

Jamie told me to write about having trouble writing, to write about the issues in my life and to write about what it feels like to get smacked with rejection on a near daily basis.  I told her I thought that idea was rather self-indulgent.  She said so what. 

My reasons for killing the last blog had had a lot to do with it reaching a point where my quippy introspection were starting to feel trite and because a few stupid comments from people I respected had stirred up my deepest insecurities. 

I told Jamie this and she told me to write about it. 

She wanted me to write about my issues.  Well doesn’t that just feel like a Lifetime made-for-tv movie.   

“So think about it beyond you. Think about how people deal with issues, with adversity on a greater whole.”

And that started to make sense.

So we come to my great fixer-upper metaphor.  Granted it is not the most original idea I have ever come up with but I do think it says a lot about dealing with our shit.  What if dealing with all of the stuff that we are less than thrilled with about ourselves was less of a chore and more of a learning experience.  Clearly, there is a whole industry based on self- help, on making people feel like they MUST become someone different in order to be happy. To which, I cry Bullshit.

I am not talking about becoming someone different.  I like me.  I like my foundation.  I am just talking about painting a few shutters and remodeling a back porch. 

(And if you can’t figure out what back porch I am referring to you might want to stop reading now because that is as clever as my metaphors are going to get.)