Reflections on those late twenties

When some people at the office hear that I'm 27, they look a little confused. I can hear the little beads on their internal abacus clicking - "but wait," they are thinking, "I thought you were... *young*."

Welcome to the world of "pushing thirty". It's a world where the slightly older participants of a previous generation look at me with mounting concern and sometimes even have a courage to ask the questions that plagued a generation of Mary Tyler Moores attempting to make it on their own: am I planning to get married soon, wouldn't it be best to have children before I'm thirty... isn't my biological clock sucking desperately at the last sludges of its little lithium battery?? My response - in traditionally enigmatic dialect of my chosen profession: "I have no immediate plans to do so."

I can't say I mind pushing thirty so far. I suppose it helps that most of my friends and significant others have always been just a few years (2-6 years) older than me and as such I've already confronted many of the demons that these earlier stages of aging presents. When my first ex reached his 30th birthday three or four years ago, I stared wide-eyed into the abyss of adulthood. It did strike some fear, but in time the abyss and I grew acquainted; although I'm not fully ready for a committed relationship with adulthood, I'm at least willing to take it slow and see where things go between us.

As far as I'm concerned, life continues to get better every year. That sounded pretty Pollyanna, but seriously, look at how miserable and confusing it is to be a teenager, allow for that to extend into the twenties as it inevitably seems to have done in our generation, and you'll have a good indication of just how great it is to be "maturing" these little smidgens at a time. And uncannily enough, I seem to be doing just that.