I just turned 35. It hasn’t been overly traumatic, but it has brought a few things into perspective. I’m the age at which my dad was when I was bown. I’m halfway to 70 and past the halfway point to officially becoming a senior citizen. I’ve come nearly as many years since the age I was upon graduating from high school. Turning 30 was probably the biggest “wake-up call” I have gotten on realizing how old I’ve become. I started to realize that I could not run as fast or as far as I used to. It was the first time I really began to become concerned about what I eat. Each day something reminds me that I’m not as young as I once was. A lady I know was telling me that her chidlren had never heard of a drive-in movie, for example and thought the idea of watching a movie from inside one’s car sounded strange. Lots of kids have never seen a record player in action, either. My nephew recently asked me if they had 64-color crayon sets when I was a kid (they did, but he seemed to think I lived in some ancient era when 8 colors was all anyone could ever hope for). l I have a feeling that turning 40 is going to hit me harder than anything I’ve experienced to date.
On my 50th birthday I had been unemployed for two months, had one child in college, two more nearing college and a wife who needed an operation.
To top things off, my ex-wife and my sister had recently lost their jobs, and my other sister’s husband had to lay off employees at his company for the first time in its history.
No one had any fun that year.
When I turned 18 in 1967, the draft was still on, so eighteen was seven leagues closer to Vietnam. A couple years later, I got as far as the draft physical, where I was declared unfit for military service. After that, no birthday was a strain.
Turning 30 didn’t really faze me as much as I expected, only because I was pregnant and more focused on that than on getting old. (And yeah, I still feel like being in my 30s is sort of old-ish. I liked my 20s.)
I’ll be 35 at the end of this year, and it’s bothering me. That’s how old my mom was when she had me, so she’ll turn 70 a week after my birthday, and she’ll be twice as old as me, and 70 just sounds old, way too old for my mom. Plus, it means I can’t even pretend I’m in my early 30s, and I’m pushing 40, and I had so much fun teasing my SO about turning 40 and how old he was, and how he had one foot in the grave. Paybacks are due, I suspect.
30 sucked donkey ass. All the way through my first 29 years on this rock I felt I was young and had the world laid out in front of me. The world was my oyster, dammit! There were no boundaries and nothing holding me back from becomming Supreme Ruler of All.
Then I turned 30 and realized it was time to face the fact that I had been an adult for a few years and it was time to start acting like it. At the age of 30 my parents had 2 of us, dad had a Master’s degree and was VP of a hospital. Mom had a B.S. and was an RN. We all lived together in our own home on a lake. How the hell did I miss the boat?!? :smack:
40 is scaring the shit out of me, but as David Simmons pointed out, getting older beats the shit out of the alternative. Well, depending on the mood I’m in that day. 
I loved turning 30! Danced on the beach while I watched the sunrise.
Hated turning 40. Then my forties turned out to be so much fun! Everything changed and turned completely upside down. You never know. Turning 50 was a piece of cake and 60 was okay too. So far, so good.
The secret is having a new goal for every decade.
Based on your fiestiness (sp?) I always thought you were in your early 20’s.
I don’t think you’re ever going to die. 
Zoe is very ancient. She is Aphrodite’s older (and more beautiful) sister. In olden days, Zoe hunted the feared Yeti with Loki and the great wolf, Fenris, when all the world was as the Great White North.
You ask how I know these things? Because I’m one year older than Zoe, and as previously discussed, Zoe is older than dirt. :eek: (I’m gonna’ catch hell for this little bit of fun)
I can’t remember having a bad feeling about a birthday. Turning 12 seemed great. 16 brought the thrill of driving and owning a car. 21 meant I no longer needed to carry a fake ID to get into bars, and 55 brought lots of junk mail from AARP. What’s not to like about birthdays?
Zoe is da bomb!
The only birthday that bothered me was 30.
Was in a bar with a bunch of friends, having a great time and when it turned midnight I made a fool of myself by just bursting out in tears…not cool in a Gay bar in Berlin. It was just that I had done so much in my 20’s…graduated from college, moved to Europe, got a great job…it just seemed at the time like it was all over for me now. Stupid but true.
Then again, I was 35 two years in a row.
How, you ask?
Somehow, on my 34th birthday somebody asked how old I will be, and I said 35, meaning next year. They misunderstood, and strangely enough, so did I. I spent an entire year thinking I was 35 and it wasn’t until my supposed 36th birthday when someone asked what year I was born. They said, “well that means you are 35 now.”
In retrospect, the odd thing was that I had always wanted to be 35. It just seemed like a nice age, where I would have my act together…to a certain extent I did, but obviously didn’t have my act together to know how old I was. Still, it is kind of cool to think I was 35 years old for two years, and I firmly believed it at the time!
Bastard!!!
I remember my tenth birthday, I thought it was soooo cool that I was a decade old!
Fast forward ten years. 20th birthday is creeping up. I was not terribly pleased. 20 is an odd age – sandwiched somewhere between teenager angst and adult cynicism. I felt better though after all my 24-year-old friends told me that being in your early twenties is far superior to being in your late teens.