I, Muehlenhaus. U, Riedermaus.

Looking back on it all, I guess it's been a good ride. I mean, the 20s were overrated anyway. You spend your teens just chomping at the bit to turn 21 (at least as an American citizen), so you kind of overlook turning 20 years old anyway. By the time you wake up from your hangover, you are 24 and have a receding hairline that won't grow back. So you become introspective and start writing short fiction and poetry about the rain and sun and clouds, instead of "love" and "peace," which was so 1990, and you reach to your inner depths to illustrate that you are much deeper in your thoughts than you really are. After all, at around 24 or 25 your youthful looks begin to fade and all you have going for you from this point on are your brains and sensitivity. This works for a while, even though in the end your hormones always trump the act of being sensitive and no matter how much you talk about good authors with your girlfriends, you really just want to roll around in the sheets with them. Nonetheless, you start to feel as though you have this "life" thing figured out. You discuss culture, win someone over, make love in a very bourgeois setting and way, and then go protest some injustice together before things don't work out because you aren't feminist enough or she isn't cultured enough. After this spat, you begin settle down even more. You might get married and realize it is a mistake. Instead of overeacting, you just get out of the unhealthy situation -- all calm like. Everything is very clear -- like a penalty shot in soccer. The only way you can miss is if you panic. You stop drinking as heavily. You stop dissing popular culture just to diss popular culture -- a habit I made quite a living on through my teens. Though, still engaging one's mind by venturing into overpriced art museums around the world, you also begin to enjoy the small things in life, like going to a Twins game and sitting inside when it is a beautiful day outside. Instead of thinking, "I'm missing a great day outside," you are relieved that you have free air conditioning. Then the mid-20s pass you by, and suddenly you start to feel far older than most of the blokes and gals you see in the halls of academia around you. This is terribly frightening, actually. For as a grad student starting out in your early-to-mid-20s, you fit in with the undergraduate students around you. You were essentially one of them with the privilege of grading them. As these are the people you had seen yourself associating with throughout the rest of your career, this being the reason you chose the academic route to begin with, even subtle differences in outlook and ways of doing things begin to rattle your nerves. The differences don't necessarily come from being older in years, I suppose. It is more or less because you better understand the academic system, the structure of things around you. You are less insecure within the university. You know that all of these rules and regulations and bureaucratic hurdles are negotiable. You take things less seriously, particularly after working in the real world for a year, as you realize that unlike the working world, nothing is life-and-death in the academic one. In a sense, you become less volatile. (Although, my anti-Israel tirade from last night may prove me otherwise.) Tamed through experience. Less, I don't know, less intense. I guess another way of saying this, rather than saying what it is not, is to say that you become comfortably lazy. Hell, you stop going to concerts as much. Far more content on buying the CD and listening to it in the comfort of your own living room. You stop socializing just to not feel lonely. In fact, having space becomes a priority. Of course, it is not a fair comparison, as for a start, you find that you actually have more physical personal space. For example, after a while, as you approach 30, it suddenly dawns on you that you have a living room in which to hang out. I can't explain it, but one day you come down stairs -- your stairs! -- and realize that you don't have to avoid the living room anymore, because there are no annoying flatmates coming in and compulsively talking your ear off. All of the training you acquired from communal living and over-socializing in your early 20s begins to wear off like the tattoo of an ex-lover's name. You start growing in new ways. You start to see your mortality. (Sometimes this insight is sped along by having a gun pointed at you in a foreign city with no one coming to your aid.) And then, before you know it, before you even pause to think about it or care, one day you turn 30. And nothing changes, but everything feels better. You associate with the number more than you could with 20-something. You now have a positivist division from those still lingering in your 20s. A quantitative justification for being emotionally separated and different from those below you. At 29, you don't have that comfort. Other than being a prime number, you ain't shit. But at 30... 30 feels good. The receding hairline? I don't have to spend as much time trying to hide it. Hell, I'm thirty. I'm on my way to the grave. Downhill from here, assuming that all the Central European cuisine I've consumed in my lifetime has irrevocably begun gridlocking my arteries. Glasses... I need to pull those out. Hopefully gray hair settles in before too long, so I start to look aged like a decent cheese. I ain't sharp cheddar anymore. I'm getting soggy and soft like Brie or Camembert. Not as easy to trim the edges when I get moldy. The youth is long gone, but now the age is right and I can start to don that "professorial" look -- graying, receding hairline, glasses, enhanced crow's feet from reading too many godawful journal articles, and ear hair. Yes, lots of ear hair. Here is the terrible truth, I started getting ear hair at 21, which is far too early. And creepy! Even I find it repulsive. So the plucking began long ago. And I've made it nine years. I can now let it show a little more. It only adds to that aged persona.

Some things don't change, however. I still love hanging out with friends of any age chatting about good movies, good tunes, and politics. I enjoy getting buzzed at my in-laws and challenging their lab to a wrestling match, which I can't possibly win. I still universally cheer for the underdog. I enjoy hanging out with my family and flying off the handle about inane extended family gossip. I love just holding Birgit's hand as we walk around the lake. I am content as hell sitting on my front stoop with Mette. I still distrust academic geographers, a surly lot that largely ended up in academia merely because they didn't have any interest outside of getting 4.0s and sounding smart. I still love to sound provincial to put people at ease, and then, when I feel cornered by pomposity in a social setting, I love to pull out the ol' GRE vocab for a sucker punch. (By the way, that's about all the GRE is good for.) That's never changed. Before the GRE vocab it was the ACT vocab. And before that, it was Newsweek vocab. Yes, I guess I've always been an ass like that. But it is my last defense, and that has not changed. And I am digressing, because this isn't about turning 30 at all anymore, but about how I am feeling more comfortable with who I am, who I am not, and who I will never become than ever before, and I'm glad it is all kind of settling into place around a magic number that society puts a lot of weight on. Yes, that's what I'm getting at. Probably a good place to end, as really I am just procrastinating working on the Cold War PowerPoint I want to finish today. Some things definitely don't change, procrastination is one of them.