Mind Your Own God Damn Business

Yup, That's exactly what it's like.

I turned 30 earlier this month.

At first, I thought that I would miss my 20′s – my goofy, youthful days of playing Final Fantasy 7 until I was cross eyed, ditching class, making poor, poor decisions and shirking responsibility in favor of surfing the Internet, masturbating or playing gameboy at every opportunity. The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized that my 20′s actually kind of sucked. This is nothing new – I’ve dedicated hours of thought and hundreds of blog posts to fondly remembering little chunks of my 20′s and then deciding that they weren’t actually as great as I remember them, but it didn’t really dawn on me until my birthday a few weeks ago that the entire decade was pretty bad. I’m going to make an effort to make sure that my 30′s aren’t a repeat performance, and as the curtain falls on the decade, I thought I would remember some of my experiences from October of 1999 to now.

1. Feeling Old

I rocked this hard throughout my 20′s. I’m too ashamed to dig through the archives of all of my old blogs, but I can almost guarantee that every third post was me saying things like “Well, guys, I had a good run, but it’s all over now. There were some good times and some bad times, but now that I’m 22 years old, I can feel the icy embrace of death starting to wash over my body,” and “I had so much I wanted to accomplish, but it’s hopeless now. I mean, I’m 24 years old. All that’s left for me to do is let the liver spots and arthritis eat what’s left of my wrinkled, balding carapace.”

This was great on two levels. First of all, sitting around and moping about how old you are is stupid. You could be spending that time masturbating, eating nachos and listening to metal (I’ve never done all three at once, but I’m pretty sure I could if I really wanted to. Spoiler alert: I really want to). Second of all, I was crying about how old I was because I was 23. There’s never a bad time for jacking off, rocking out and eating nachos, but 23 is an especially fine year for it.

For whatever reason, without really making a conscious decision to do it, my “What a long, strange trip it’s been!” attitude wore off at about 29. I’m 30 years old now, which according to my carefully performed calculations is more than 6 years older than I was when I was 23, but I actually feel younger than I did then.

2. Driving My Sweet ’91 Camry

I didn't think it was cool at the time, but the more I look at this picture, the more I realize that during the brief period that I owned this car, I was rolling harder than any other motherfucker on the streets.

This was actually something awesome about my 20′s. My first two years of car ownership involved a brown 1982 Ford Fairmont and a brown 1980 Audi. Through a delicate blend of neglect and poor driving skills, I managed to send both to the junkyard in a remarkably short amount of time. By the time I had rendered the Audi unusable, I had settled into a nice groove of buying and then subsequently destroying a new car every 9 months or so.

Then, when I was 21, my parents sold me their white ’91 Camry, and it lasted me the rest of my 20′s. It didn’t have a whole lot of power, and it always seemed like it was right on the verge of disintegrating, but it almost never broke while I owned it, and I drove it a lot – during one especially heavy period, I was dating a girl who lived about an hour and a half away from me and I was driving to and from her apartment every night. I remember how pissed off I was when gas skyrocketed to an unaffordable $1.75 a gallon before dropping down to $1.25 again. I finally gave the car up a few months ago, when I took it in to get looked at because of a slipping clutch and a was told that it would be about 1400 dollars to fix everything.

It wasn’t a perfect car by any stretch of the imagination, but I’ll always have fond memories of driving on the highway at night with the windows rolled down, rocking out to music and thinking about how I would be having sex with my girlfriend later that evening. Sex, for those of you that don’t know, is kind of the holy grail for 21 year old guys. It’s like Matlock for old people, or dead, underage boys for Sean Hannity.

( Note: I’m not saying that Sean Hannity fucks young boys, and dead ones at that – I’m just wondering why he hasn’t responded to the accusation. What is he so afraid of? What is he trying to hide? I mean, other than his boner, every time a dead young boy enters the room?)

3. Hating my Life

Sitting in my room, thinking about all of my wasted opportunities, lamenting my failures and contemplating how I'm totally going to avenge my girlfriend's death.

I’m not quite sure what changed in my life between the ages of 19 and 20, but I made an abrupt transition from relative optimism about my life to a steadfast conviction that I had crashed and burned too hard to ever hope to salvage anything from the burning wreckage. No matter what was going on, it was a complete, utter failure. Granted, my 20′s weren’t the most productive decade of my life, but they weren’t the total disaster that I make them out to be, either.

I was thinking about this earlier: suppose I go to bed the night before I turn 20. I wake up the next day, 30, with no memory of what has happened for the last 10 years. I think that there would be some disappointments, but I think that for the most part I would feel pretty good.

Who am I kidding? I already know how it would go: “Holy fuck! My room is full of computers that can pirate music, play games and have high speed Internet? I’m not 30! I died last night and went to heaven!”

Once the excitement of all of the new technology wore off (probably somewhere around 38), I think I would be pretty satisfied with things. I certainly wouldn’t kill myself, like I felt like I should for the duration of my 20′s.

4. Going to College

I took about three years off from school during my 20′s, although I only count one of them because I was technically enrolled in classes for the other two. Either way, I spent my 20′s in college. That’s not all that unusual, although most people that do that get PhDs, not a bachelors degree. It doesn’t really matter. Even if I never use my econ degree, and it seems kind of unlikely that I will, finally finishing was one of the most amazing feelings of my life. Up until then, I wasn’t sure I had it in me to get a degree, and getting that monkey off of my back was a pretty amazing feeling. I also met a lot of really cool people in the process. An alarming percentage of my friends are people that I met during during my two years at UNC.

I’m still in college, so I guess that it technically doesn’t count as a chapter of my life that is now closed, but the end is in sight, and I think I’ll be yelling at kids, stealing cell phones and getting summers off pretty soon.

5. Living in Apartments

I spent my 20′s living in the kind of apartments that 20 year old guys live in. That is to say, shit holes. And I liked all of them and have good memories of all of them.

Unfortunately, I’ve decided that while I’m back in school and able to work less, it makes the most sense to swallow my pride and move back home to minimize student loan debt, so every day of my life as a 30 year old I’ve lived at home.

Even if it’s kind of hard on my pride, it adds a compelling twist to my “going to bed 19, waking up 30″ scenario, since I would wake up in about the same spot in the exact same room. The more I think about it, the more suspicious I am that 19 year old me would actually think my life kicks a lot of ass now.

“My bed it twice as big and comfortable! I have a cellphone and an iPod! Is that a laptop? Hey, my acne is gone! Holy fuck, my life is awesome! Way to go, 30 year old me!”

6. A Disappointing Denver Broncos Franchise

I probably don't even have to put a caption on this; you already know what I'm going to say. A picture of someone, obviously incredibly pumped up about something - it's a pretty safe bet that I will be making some repetitive, played-out joke either about metal or him shitting his pants, right? Fine. I won't do it. It's too easy anyway. ...it does kind of look like he's listening to Pantera though, doesn't it?

Granted, they ended the 90′s hot – back to back Superbowls were amazing, but other than an AFC Championship game in 2005 that all but guaranteed that I will hate Ben Rothlesburger and the Pittsburgh Steelers for the rest of their franchise’s miserable, dog-fucking existence, the Broncos struggled to find success during my 20′s.

My 30′s have been a different story. As a matter of fact, since I turned 30, the Broncos haven’t lost a single game.

It’s true. Look it up.

I’ll take it one step further and guarantee that they won’t lose this Sunday either. We’ll see how the rest of the season goes, but so far, so good. My sister and I used to argue about Josh McDaniels; I thought he was a jackass who was destroying the team I loved. She thought he was hot. Now, the only thing we argue about is which one of us he gets to have sex with first.

—————

My 20′s weren’t terrible, but a little bit of reflection and a game plan of some sort could’ve made for an even better decade.

My neighbor told me the other day that her 30′s were the best years of her life. I’m going to make an effort to be sure that mine are too.

So far, so good.

6-0, BABY!