I M 30

Last Saturday was my big 3-0 birthday. As you may know from Your Matt’s Guide to Being an Adult, I spent my late-20’s considering as my pre-30’s to prepare myself for adulthood. I followed my own advice and now feel empowered with my new stature in age. Sure, many of the people I look up to are now younger than I am. I know it’s too late to fulfill my dream of becoming a professional keytar player for the New York Philharmonic. It’s too late for me to learn how to play football and be the best dang fullback the Bangals have ever seen. I will never even learn how to walk a tightrope, let alone have a well known juggling, unicycle riding, tightrope act at the Renaissance Fair.

Missing out on these things sits lightly on my conscience, however. Time marches on and interests change. If I did become a great keytar player, I would still be aware that I wasn’t playing for the Bangals, so there is really no reason to lament missed opportunities.

Now I accept the 30’s with open arms. It is known as the time where people become comfortable with themselves. I am worried a bit about what the far future holds, assuming any of us will be left after 2012, so I will start now to prepare myself for then. As of now, I am considering this to be my pre-elderly years. Here are some of those practices I can do now to get in the groove:

• Switch over the morning pick-me-up from coffee to milk of magnesia. It doesn’t give the shakes, and allows for an active lifestyle of running to the bathroom.
• Start going to bed at 8:00 and waking just before 5:00. Nothing is quite as relaxing as a leisurely morning of reading the local paper, eating a bowl of grapenuts, and listening to the Weather Channel in the background.
• Oh boy.. what else is there? I hope these aren’t the only things to look forward to in my golden years.

So if I do these things now, when I turn 60, I’ll be all ready to go. I’m not sure what comes next. I supposed I could live 70+ as if I were already in the afterlife. I could start haunting people. Yeah, that’s not bad. If I get busted for breaking an entering, and I claim I was haunting them, they wouldn’t send me to jail. I would get to hang out with other people of my same mindset in the institution… and haunt them too.