A lot has happened in the two months since I last wrote. For starters, I am now officially closer to my forties than my twenties, appropriately timed given the newest addition to my London apartment- a twenty year old flatmate. Yep, twenty. TWO. ZERO. Are you feeling a little jealous of all that youth? All that hope, promise, and freedom from cynicism? Despite my initial reservations, she has defeated almost every conception of what I thought living with a barely legal person would be like. She is properly GenZ. Unique, independent, technology focused, and ethical (though I did notice she threw a cucumber in the trash instead of the compost today). The age disparity is less noticeable in matters of daily conversation and more in matters of operation. For instance, she is the first to reinstate the value of my independence/relationship abstinence, but when it comes to her using my old school kettle (and by "old school" I mean, the kind that heats up the water by sitting on the stove rather than plugging into the wall) she asked "How do you work this thing?".
In some ways she actually seems more prototypically adult than me. This was noticeable the other evening when she prepared her dinner of crab cakes and salad with premium FETA, while I opted for popcorn and Primitivo. We have a really nice symbiotic relationship developing, where she might admire me for belonging to a Whatsapp group called "Intellectual Girls WLTT" (an acronym for "who love their titties"), and giving zero fucks walking to the local grocery to buy a £10 mango, wearing my robe and this:
So ya, I turned 36 and it was actually one of the best birthdays I can remember. There was a legal break in strict social distancing at the time so I managed to have a proper party with my crew at a bar in Chelsea and then bicycle back to East London with an oversized balloon strapped to my dungarees while london honked and shouted birthday wishes at me from the windows of their cars. I also treated myself to £300 worth of dental care (dental hygiene not covered either by NHS or my private insurance <insert tasteless stereotype on british teeth>), descaled my kettle, and had a good think about my goals for the year, something I do every August. I tend to really endeavor to execute my goals once I've committed them to the page and as such they tend to be things that are challenging but mostly in my control. This year because everything is tits up and out of control anyway, I decided to add on an annual goal that taps into metaphysics or the law of attraction or whatever, that "when you visualize it you materialize it" kinda maxim. So I added "get a boyfriend, fall in love" to my list. There, I SAID IT. No more of that "when you stop looking for it, it will happen" nonsense. I am taking a different, grab life by the testicles kind of approach and going alpha female on love. Anna, my sage, twenty year old flatmate tells me this is called "manifesting".
Then. Other things I've noticed about getting older since August: I love to spend money and hate to waste it. I spent 70 quid on some lush eye retinol, only to drop the glass jar on my tiled bathroom floor the moment I took it out of the box. So i scraped up all that anti-aging gel off the floor, including the tiny fragments of commingled glass, and put it in another container. I'd rather dab eye gel with glass shards and pubes in it onto the most delicate layer of my face than waste a full bottle of anything Dr. Dennis Gross. I invest in quality loungewear. I have almost totally outgrown Sriracha. I iron my pillowcases. I am more political. I get excited when I get handed two-for-one cocktail flyers for bars in shoreditch (love a good coupon but also chuffed to think that they don't see my aging face as an impediment to their business). I also noticed a distinct sense of pride when my esthetician told me I had much less body hair down there than most her clients, who are overwhelmingly under the age of 28. I have developed an Instagram addiction that not even The Social Dilemma could spoil and am unsure whether this is age appropriate or not but at very least confirms my evolving strict adherence to habit. I have purchased exactly ONE share of BEYOND MEAT (BYND) because I want to be an adult with assets, but that's all I could afford. I am now more inclined to think I'm bleeding internally after having an episode of black stool than remembering I had a charcoal based pizza the night before, because, deteriorating abdominal organs. And I have unabashedly picked my nose in a digital work meeting thinking my zoom camera was turned off because, deteriorating cranial organs.
In other events over the last two months, I completed my ballot for the Presidential Election which with Kanye West front and center looked more like a meme than a political undertaking. But perhaps the most troubling event of late was losing my beloved grandmother, my mother's mother. A deliciously warm and positive woman with the most moving, generous spirit. I will save those real things earnest for the grottos of my heart, but her final piece of advice to me was serendipitously in accordance with one of my own line items: stop waiting so long to have babies.
