T-Minus Three Days and Counting...

No more brain trust! Yay! At long last, they hired someone else full-time, thus relieving me of my filing/copying/pacifying Upper East Side parents duties slightly earlier than I'd expected, but not a moment too soon. I had to seal my brain off to work there without screaming. Unfortunately, I couldn't unseal it on command at the day's end, so I've been stewing in a whole load of toxic juices for a while now. Gotta keep those seratonin levels up!

In other news, I'm turning thirty on Sunday, and while some older friends are pulling the ain't-tryin'-to-hear-that-you're-just-a-baby routine (justifiably, I must add), it's still a bit of a mind fuck. Sure, I know thirty is the new twenty or whatever, but I grew up reading a lot of Tennessee Williams, and Blanche DuBois was over the hill at my age. My dad, who is fifty-eight going on eighty going on five, had a two-year-old daughter and a mortgage at thirty. My mother had only nine years left to live at thirty, which scares me most of all.

"You don't want to end up like your mother, do you?" was a constant refrain in my childhood. (Not from my dad, I must stress, because he doesn't subscribe to the Auschwitz School of Motivational Techniques.) I've since come up with the snappy retort "You mean dead? 'Cause we're all gonna end up like her at some point." I'm still not entirely sure what was meant by that. As a teenager, I figured it meant living off my parents for my entire life, diddling about in Harrisburg music groups, convinced I had some kind of a career. Well, guess what? Thus far, I'm not that far off. Maybe it meant that I didn't want to end up having a kid and beating the shit out of her. How strange and destructive to grow up thinking I was going to end up like my mother, as if I had no say in the matter. And I really didn't think I did. For all the bluster I heard about having choices, there was still this threat that I was the way I was, and there was nothing I could do about it, because my course was unalterably set. I didn't know who the hell to believe. I certainly couldn't believe my father. Who was he? What did he know about raising kids? And he was the only one calling bullshit on all this, so how could I trust him?

Thank god I don't have a kid to worry about, at least. I swore when I was thirteen I wasn't even going to think about having kids until I was at least thirty-five, and that still stands. The idea of having a thing in my uterus makes me nauseous. I think it stems from a dream I had when I was fourteen in which I was pregnant with a seahorse. Later that year, my biology teacher drew a crude pregnant abdomen on the board with a stick figure fetus to explain amniocentesis, and I actually passed out. I guess if I'm going to do the mom thing, I should adopt, except I think I'm pretty set on the position that I love kids, as long as they belong to someone else.

So what should I do this year? I feel like I should do something momentous, something geared toward putting my life in some kind of order. Should I lose weight and start making the rounds of casting agents? Should I write that novel? Should I just focus on "healing myself", whatever that means? Or should I just get that tattoo and say mission accomplished? Any suggestions, book contracts, or NEA grants would be welcome...