I am become Woman, the Comforter of Worlds

Today I am WOMAN. Numerically. There are some womanly milestones I hit years ago, like giving up faked orgasms, and others I've yet to reach, like being able to keep mittens in my possession without running a string between them and threading them through the sleeves of my coat. But today I'm 30 years old, and I've lost any excuses for bad behaviour on the basis of immaturity, and I've gained status in society for making it this far without poking one of my own eyes out or getting addicted to crystal. I'm mature. I'm robust. I'm drinkable and my Beaujolais days are behind me though I'm still quite fruity.

And yet thinking about it - which I do, as 30 is an important birthday - despite the two degrees and the international travel and the reams and reams of material for my biographers veering from the salacious to the pornographic to the administrative over my 20's, I don't feel there's much difference between the Me now and the Me yesterday, brain-wise. 30 is a marker for the rest of the world, and the day I ditched girlhood for womanhood in my brain was the day I realized the prospect of fucking only one man until I died was more attractive than tragic. But as a generality, the last decade, which happens to have been my twenties, did teach me five valuable lessons that I didn't even dream were on the curriculum when I was nineteen:

1. Play nice.
2. The 'nice' is more important than the 'play'.
3. The 'play' remains imperative.
4. The 'play' is not the same as 'act'.
5. The 'nice' is not the same as 'likable'.

Those were occasionally hard-learned lessons, and I'm trembling with anticipation and a degree of nervousness over what my 30's will teach me. Hopefully how to sew, and perhaps how to grow my own. Happy Mistress La Spliffe's birthday, everyone!