Thirty-one came and went with­out too much trauma–in fact, it was kind of nice. Kelly Sue and I were ladies who lunched, Ryan and I had a quiet night since we’re hav­ing our offi­cial birth­day din­ner Mon­day and my fam­ily cel­e­brates tonight.

But I am sud­denly aware, maybe even hyper–aware, of the fact that I am no longer 21. Actu­ally, 21 seems very very near (Remem­ber that time we were walk­ing up Avenue A at 4am and we saw Mark Ibold and I decided we should fol­low him?) but awfully far away, like those were scenes from some­one else’s life. Or a movie. A slow-moving bio­graph­i­cal tale that fol­lows our hero­ine as she stum­bles through attempts at romance and career advance­ment while tak­ing advan­tage of par­ties with goodie bags and open bars. It’s not the most inter­est­ing movie, but there are some funny parts.

They’re lit­tle reminders: the fact that my stack of CDs at Love Gar­den is no longer an indi­ca­tor of release dates and hip­s­ter­dom (I’m a good six months behind on every­thing, not to men­tion I get really out­raged when I browse the used sec­tion and find per­fectly good things–the entire career out­put of Polvo–there. Who would sell Polvo? Who?). Or that I find myself start­ing sen­tences about how I don’t under­stand what the kids are into. I like going to bed early. Just some­one stop me if I pull out the mom jeans, OK?