Not Twenty-Eight

When too much happens, I don't write.

Suddenly it's October. I really missed my brother on Friday, October 1st, when no one snuck up to me to pinch and punch me in the arm and say 'Pinch, punch 1st of the month'. I had no chance to respond 'Flick, kick for being so quick' with a Karate Kid flourish.

It's not the first month to go by since I left home, but it's the most monumental so it struck a chord.

I was 28 when I left to come to Vancouver, and now I'm not. Twenty-eight sounds grown up, yet still fun; it sounds witty and brave and knowledegable and flirtatious. Twenty-eight owns an awesome handbag collection and can afford to actually buy books from shops. Twenty-eight is certainly beloved by someone and able to cook.

Of course, all these things weren't necessarily true for me when I was 28, but I liked the sound of the number, and these are the images conjured when I read about other people who shared my age. She's 28 too! She must have it together! Yet her boobs won't have fallen down yet. Cool!

Twenty-eight is hot, it rocks. I don't intend to stop aiming for hotness or rocking on occasion, but 29 just doesn't create the same kind of mental image. In fact, 29 only says one thing:

Almost thirty.

I can hear the chorus now; Robin Sparkles (formerly LNB takes her new name from How I Met Your Mother) 'It doesn't matter these days!' and Mimi, my friend in Milano 'You've earned every line on your face!' and my Mum, specifically, 'Whatevs, you still look 12 in a pony tail.'

But maybe it should matter. It's a milestone, like turning 16 (and cutting all your hair off the exact week that the meanest girl in school, who happens to share your first name, also got all her hair cut off, whatabitch!) or leaving home (for the fifth time).

I am 29 and I live in Vancouver. How did I get here? Before investigating this I plan to back up a little and mention a few notable exploits from the last 3 weeks.

p.s. there is inconsistency in the way I have expressed numbers in this post. It's because I don't properly understand the rules on this and a cursory googling led me to divergent results. I know you can't start a sentence with a digit, but then I wrote out 'thirty' instead of '30' to give it more weight.

p.p.s. I have been reliably informed that this blog is home to numerous typos. While this horrifies my sensibilities, I re-read all the posts before publishing them yet I am obviously unable to see my own errors (much like in life!). I've decided to try to let it go. This isn't easy and it haunts me at night.