Contact High-Sorta. No, Not Really.

I am ambivalent about reaching 40. Well, in general, overall,  I’m just shocked. I mean c’mon I was part of the “Me Generation.“  Hair Bands were a thing to be lusted over, not mocked. (Really, does Jon Bon Jovi age, at all? That man will probably make catheters and adult Depends look sexy. Why couldn’t he be twice my age + 7??) Every last one of us secretly believed, on some level, that we would grow up to be pampered rock stars. If we grew up at all. Aside from the disappointment that there will not be legions of fans and groupies waiting to serve my every need, there is this complete incredulity that I have actually lived to have had kids and raised a family.

Part of the reason that we were such hedonistic, pot-smoking, ( I only inhaled the second-hand smoke in my middle-school bathroom. No, honestly! Actually, truth be known, I was a religious ice queen but that‘s beside the point)  rebel children was that we were also a generation who was raised with the cold war hanging over our heads, every damn day.  If we were all gonna die anyway, why not have what you want when you want it and lots of it?

“Russia” was responsible for every evil thing that anybody could come up with.  Movie after movie portrayed the world as one step away from complete and total destruction with those of us who managed to survive having to learn to speak Russian out of our badly deformed irradiated mouths.  Speaking of which, do you remember those nuclear bombing films that they used to show us in school? The one in which that playground of children was reduced to ash by the huge, boiling, fire-cloud? Truth be known, that movie is probably single-handedly responsible for some of my more expensive therapy bills. ;P  Afterwards, the teachers would flick on the lights and, while the projector was still whirring away rewinding the film, we were instructed to practice getting under our desks in case of a bombing.

I distinctly remember the moment in time when I realized the disconnect between the film that I’d just seen and the fact that my little elementary school legs were crammed underneath my flimsy wood and metal desk. My desk was missing one of its little, metal, coin “feet”- it couldn’t hold me, my books, papers and pencils upright without rocking vainly against the hard linoleum floor. THIS was going to protect me from nuclear fall-out? Um, no. All this bomb drill “practice” was simply to make the adults feel like they were doing SOMETHING, anything, against the annihilation that was sure to come.  Fast-forward 30 some odd years and I’m sending my own kids to school to sit in flimsy desks of their own.  And, on some level, my brain just won’t accept it.

I am going to keep this blog until the big 4-0 slaps me in the face and then I can say that I did it. I shall slide into my forties with grace and easy reflection on my earlier years.  Oh, who am I kidding? I am totally freaking out about turning 40. There, I said it. And, I am screaming into the void in hopes that some echo of meaning will bounce back to me and  I just don’t care, anymore, what that says about me. My mom always said that the best thing about turning 40 was that you quit caring what anybody else thought. I think she was a little right and a little wrong-I do care what other people think, I just care what I think more.

(Okay, “freaking out,” and “screaming into the void,” may be just a tad melodramatic-I’m “introspective," yeah, that’s the word-introspective.)

There are lots of reasons not to do this, including that the mental remnants of my inner 16 year old rebel-child refuses to bow down to the clichés of the modern world <pout> I WILL NOT have a blog (or a tattoo) like the rest of everybody else in the modern world. I won’t, I won’t, I won’t ( … and, I was thinking dragon on the tattoo, what do you think?)

For my 40th birthday, 

I am giving myself 

6 months of Blog-Time. 

Wow, way to put that 

English degree to work!