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Chasing Thirty: Make Amends

Chasing Thirty: Make Amends

When I was starting my list the better part of a year ago, one of the first things I added was ‘apologize to Jessica’. Jessica was one of my very best friends in high school; she was super smart, kind and one of the funniest people I’ve ever met. Some of my best teenage memories are with her. We sang in the choir together, double-dated on prom night and when I went halfway across the world to track down my first love, she went with me. We hadn’t spoken for almost ten years and I had always missed her. More »

Chasing Thirty: Bring Back the Landline

Chasing Thirty: Bring Back the Landline

When you’re approaching thirty, you find that for the first time your nostalgia is meaningful. Meaningful because you remember things from a legitimately bygone era and you’ve likely seen some major trends come and go. There’s a world that you knew that not only the children of today but also the nascent adult masses—the college co-eds and the interns—will never know. Take for instance the telephone. More »

Chasing Thiry: The Saturn Return

Chasing Thiry: The Saturn Return

In discussing this project with people, I’ve mentioned that part of the ethos behind it was that I felt like I (and everyone I knew of a similar age) have been heading for a massive shift in my life as I approach the threshold from my twenties to my thirties. On several occasions people have nodded knowingly and said ‘Right. The Saturn Return.’ More »

The Wedding Wave

The Wedding Wave

If you’re thirty-ish like I am, you’re probably spending most of your vacation time and disposable income going to your friends’ weddings. Since I spent much of my post-college twenties in New York City (land of the perpetual bachelor/ette), most … More »

Chasing Thirty: The Fear

Chasing Thirty: The Fear

Tell me if this happens to you.

You’re at the gym or driving your car or brushing your teeth (these are the places my ideas tend to strike) and you have an epiphany. All of the things you’ve been letting marinate for months suddenly coalesce and you have the solution: how to achieve your goal whether it’s getting the attention of someone you’ve secretly been pining for or starting a company or spending a year in Paris. You stand for a moment like an animal frozen just between fight and flight. Is this a brilliant idea or a stupid one? You know it’s pretty far in one direction or the other but you don’t know which. And just as you imagine yourself seizing the day and taking that risk; this other voice storms into your brain from God knows where, spouting all of the reasons that this thing you want to do can’t be done, all of the reasons this is a bad idea, a bad time, a bad moon. That voice seems pretty damned authoritative and before you’ve spit in the sink, your nascent little epiphany has been crushed by it. That voice may sound like the voice of reason, with all its talk about bills and practicality and self-preservation but more than likely, it’s just the fear talking. More »

Chasing Thirty: Are You Afraid Of Losing Your Looks?

Chasing Thirty: Are You Afraid Of Losing Your Looks?

I was on a long car trip during a bachelorette trip recently and we got into the kind of long, winding conversations that tend to happen when a group of women are in a confined space. The ages of those in the car ranged from mid-twenties to mid thirties.

The friend in her mid-thirties seemed a little disenchanted with the age, which she said everyone talks up like it’s some golden era in one’s life. In talking about what she wasn’t so fond of getting into her mid-thirties, she hit on something that felt almost taboo once she’d said it, that she was worried she was losing her looks. More »

Chasing Thirty: The Scary Age

Chasing Thirty: The Scary Age

Over the weekend a thirty-something girlfriend and I were talking about an ex boyfriend of hers that she’s still in touch with. He’s one of those people we all have that comes in and out of our lives over the years, someone we’ve broken up with but never completely ruled out as a future possibility. She was telling me that she has a pact with the ex in question that they will marry each other if neither of them finds anyone else by the age of forty. Probably goes without saying that they were all of about twenty when they hatched this plan. More »

Chasing Thirty: Starting A Blog

Chasing Thirty: Starting A Blog

Andrea is on a quest to check off a bucket list of items in her 29th year. You can read more about her adventures at her blog, Thirty-Things.

Starting a blog was actually the first item of business on my list of things to do before I turned thirty; I write about it now because my reflections about the enterprise are likely a little more profound after six odd months of blogging than they would have been in the beginning when… More »

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