I'm 33 today. Thirty-three.
I find myself thinking about when I turned 13. For some reason that felt like a BIG birthday to me. I made my little sister take some pictures of me because I wanted to remember EXACTLY what I looked like the very day I turned 13 (I still have them somewhere). It's such a weird birthday because on the one hand you go from kid to teenager, with all that word implies. On the other hand, 13 is such a spooky number. Everything about 13 is, in a word, fraught.
I haven't decided exactly how I feel about 33. First, I love symmetry, palindromes, anagrams, and all those fun things with numbers. On the other hand, I'm really not 30 anymore. I'm in my thirties.
I keep reminding myself that Julia Child didn't take her first cooking class until she was 36. I find inspiration in late bloomer stories. This is odd, since I am not, despite periodic self-doubt, a late bloomer.
For the most part, I'm on time for most stuff. I've been married longer than a lot of people I know (9 years in October). We don't have kids -- a number of my married friends do, but an equal number don't. We are buying our apartment (Soon we will close. If you believe that there's a nice bridge in Brooklyn I can sell you.), which feels both very grown up (we will own property, sort of) and not (it's an apartment --somehow it seems a driveway would be required for full grown-up status).
And I've reached a point in my career where I get paid a decent amount to do a job that is very fun more often than not. This in stark contrast to my twenties when I made very little money to do jobs that were very much NOT fun more often than not.
So, I've decided I'm going to like being 33. Because, truth be told, what choice do I have?