Pushin' 30

When my friend Carolyn turned 30, she made a set of resolutions. When I was visiting Frederick a few weeks back, she asked me over Mexican food what my turning-30 resolutions might be.
"Hmm....I would say avoiding over-generalizing about things. Like when I have a bad day at work or a bad date, not thinking, 'I'm a total failure!' Or turning every piece of news I receive into an alarming social trend. Like when my 16-year-old co-worker wanted to be a Playboy bunny for Halloween. At the time, I thought, 'Oh no! Young girls are being taught to idolize porn stars!', when I really should have thought, 'Man, that girl is a dipshit.'"

Having some time to think a little more, I've come up with some deeper, more neccessary resolutions. The first is to simplify my life. More specifically, to stop wasting time obsessing about my mistakes. My resolution is to spend more time trying to avoid future mistakes than thinking how I could have avoided past ones.

My second resolution is to stop worrying about getting married. There are many things in life that you can plan and scheme for, but I don't think that finding true love is one of them. (Maybe that's why those E-Harmony commercials piss me off so much. Find someone using this scientific method! Choose the attributes you want in a mate! Come shop for love, so you can check it off your list!) There's no way to tell this part of the story without sounding corny, but as I was driving back from Ames today, I passed field after field of wildflowers, and a phrase from the Bible regarding worry kept popping into my head: "Look at the lilies of the field, they neither sow nor reap, yet I tell you, not even Solomon in all his glory was arrayed like these." Nor any perfectly-outfitted bride - I realized that I need to take care of the important things, like my work, my relationships, and the larger world, and stop worrying about things I can't control. ("Will I get ugly as I age?" "Have I dumped more ex-boyfriends or have more of them dumped me?") I resolve to learn from love, experience it, let it change me, and somewhere, somehow, the wedding dress will sew itself. Or in any case, my life will be woven into a tapestry far more beautiful than any gown I could wish for.