ON TURNING 30:

If you had asked me fifteen years ago how I would feel turning 30, the answer would have been “old.” Then 15-year-old Brad would have gone home and listened to the one compact disc he owned: the “Wayne’s World” soundtrack.

But here I am, fifteen years and a couple hundred CD’s later, and it’s hard to define how I feel. Parts of me do feel old; specifically my knees, hips, back, and hairline. Parts of me still feel young; my sense of humor, my unabashed love for mint chocolate chip ice cream, and my idea of what impresses women. ("Check it out! I can fit this whole Cinnabon in my mouth!")

In a lot of aspects, I’ve always felt older than my numerical age. Being an RA made me grow up quickly, and encouraged me to role model some more “adult” behaviors. Supervising people much older than me while I was at Walgreens is another one. And then coming back to college and working with students who weren’t alive when the Bears won the Super Bowl...well, that makes me feel incredibly old. (The moral of this? The Bears need to win the Super Bowl again.)

However, being around these students has done its share to keep me young. Their youthful energy has carried me through days when I just want to go home, hitch my pants way up above my waist, and start playing shuffleboard. Their hope for the future is a lighthouse against the increasing dusk of my cynicism. And their shock at my age makes me feel that at least I’m not ACTING like an old person.

I don’t know why this birthday should mean more to me than any other year; it’s just a more “round” number. It’s not like I have to get a new driver’s license or anything. Maybe it’s the feeling that my life should be figured out by now, that I should know what the next 40 years or so will hold. But, quite frankly, I have no idea. None at all.

Perhaps thirty is just a signpost. A nudge that says “Are you on the right path? Are you becoming the person you should be?” And my answer to that signpost is a mute fear that I am not becoming the person I should be, and then another mute fear that the signpost has somehow learned to speak.

I suppose the saving grace of all of this is that I know I’m not the only person to ever hit this age. Some friends have passed the threshold of their thirties recently; some have it looming on their own personal horizon. But I do know that I’m not facing it alone, and for that, I thank you.