So I turned 30 a week ago.  30.  That’s the completion of three decades.  That’s the beginning of a fourth decade.  It just doesn’t seem possible.  I was just getting used to my late 20s - really enjoying that whole renting cars and paying lower car insurance rates parts of life.  Now it’s the 30-something part of life.  The birthday itself has been pretty amazing.  It started on the 7th when I went to Washington DC with my mom, 2 aunts and 2 cousins (and the two cousins’ fiancees) for an incredible weekend.  Then I had a lovely birthday lunch on the actual day of my birth with some delightful friends, followed by a bitchin’ birthday party the following Saturday.  And today I received my birthday present - a new laptop (!) - in the mail.  So now… I’m kinda feeling that this whole birthday thing is now officially over.  I’m no longer the birthday girl (and I LOVE being the birthday girl), I’m just 30.  It’s one of those things that just doesn’t quite compute for me yet.  My <gulp> boyfriend and I joke about the fact that I’m too old for him now - he’s no longer dating a little 20-something… oh no.  Of course, lucky for me, I have college coed status, so that keeps me in the running.

Still… does it really mean anything to be thirty?  I mean, things certainly won’t be changing that much.  Back to school, back to the same old apartment, back to homework and Buffy the Vampire Slayer and all the things I loved as a 20-something. But there’s something about milestones like this - nice, round, divisible-by-five numbers that seem to signal a bend in the road, a big change - whether real or imagined.  30 sounds like a grown up’s age.  Yet here I am - having quit my grown up job and headed off back to school for what is promising to be a pretty long tour.

It’s funny (not funny ha-ha, not funny peculiar, but more like funny I-just-might-cry) to think about how little my current life resembles what I had planned around that last nice, round milestone.