Goodbye, Porpoise Spit!

And we're in the bottom of the 39th, to use a slight bastardisation of a silly baseball metaphor (possibly the world's most boring game, after cricket).  I've been trying to decide if I'm going to have any sort of minor freakout about turning 40 tomorrow.  Probably not.  Still though, I remember Dad turning 40 and thinking OMG that is so old.  And I distinctly remember Grammie got away with telling me she was 39 for a number of years in a row before I cottoned on that she might be telling a slight fib.  And a moth just kamikazed onto my keyboard from the light above.  It's kind of a pretty moth - wings sort of the colour and pattern of granite.  And I digress.  Anyway, I feel like I should somehow be more "grownup" than I think I am, though, to be honest, I'm not entirely sure why.  My youngest team member - all of 27 - to whom I had to explain the intricacies of a library card catalogue the other day - said I was "cool".  No one has ever called me cool at work before.  Maybe there is possible life after 40?

Ten years ago, I was just about to set out on this big silly adventure that's ended up with David and me in a small terraced house in a quite south London street next to a park where the hospital lands its helicopters for lack of a landing pad (soon to be remedied, apparently).  Ten years ago, Katherine made me an ice cream cake for my 30th and David and I set off to drive up the north coast to Seattle, stopping off along the way to see people and to briefly hold in our possession a seemingly cursed bone we picked up in a dry riverbed on a reservation on the north coast of California.  I was off to London to embark on some poorly thought out PhD course, in part because I didn't know what else to do at that point besides be a student, in part because it felt like an opportune time to leave America and because I had wanted to come back to London ever since I first set foot in this ridiculous little island held together with duct tape and string.  David, ever the good sport, uprooted himself from his comfortable New York existence and followed me on my not always grand adventure.  To his huge and everlasting credit, he stuck with me through the throe-y-est throes of me trying to figure out what I wanted to do when I grew up.  Beauty school drop out.  Too much partying.  Too much drama.  A series of increasingly less crap jobs.  And we're here.  I'm tapping away on the computer.  David is watching Scrubs.  I finally managed a "real job", just squeaking it in before 40 (that was my goal).  Life has (touch wood) at least a modicum of stability.  And my youngest team member says I'm "cool".  Baby's still got it. ;-)

So, no, I think I'm not that hugely worked up over 40.  I made it through the drama of the 30s.  Definitely older, potentially wiser, still in possession of the majority of my own brain cells (and teeth) and with a highly developed appreciation for the ironic and absurd.  My favourite quote, of late, not surprisingly, comes from Germain Greer - "You can only be young once, but you can be immature forever".  I do most certainly intend that to be the case. :-)