A1: As of 5:18 pm EST, I am 28 years old. I’ve been waiting to be 28 for, like, my whole life.
Seriously though, I remember being in second grade and inventing characters to play when my cousins and I played house. We chose new names and hair colors and ages for ourselves and we got to pick hunky dudes from New Kids on the Block or 90210 to be our boyfriends… and we got to choose how old we were. I was always 28. I still can’t tell you why being 28 seemed so compelling back then, but it was. In that strange, intuitive way little kids have of predicting their futures,* I always had this sense that 28 was significant.
*When I was four, I wrote a book of poems by dictating them to my dad. I even wrote an author blurb on the back cover.Yeah, I know. It’s weird. And might not come to anything at all (I might have been clairvoyant at 4 and just delusional at 8; who knows? I’m also eating frosting out of the container right now [IT IS MY BIRTHDAY, GODDAMMIT] and might die of diabetic shock before I even officially turn 28), but I feel really good about this particular age.
I think this year might be kind of awesome.
A2: Fucking OLD.
And do you know how I know this? Because the other day, one of my all-time favorite tee shirts–a t-shirt I have been wearing to bed (due to its extreme XL largeness) since I was 8 and pretending to be 28– decided to spontaneously disintegrate while I was wearing it. I woke up a couple mornings ago and my whole side was cold because at some point in the night, I managed to tear a GIGANTIC hole in the washed-a-thousand-times fabric of my very first Madonna tee, which my godfather brought back for me from some Pioneer promotional thing back in the day:
The carnage. I have no idea how I managed to do this while asleep.
This was all very sad, of course, but it only got sadder when I turned the tee over to inspect the back and realized that OH MY FUCKING GOD, it’s from Madonna’s Blonde Ambition tour. IN 1990. This t-shirt is straight-up TWENTY FREAKING YEARS OLD. I never thought I’d be so old as to have items of clothing that could vote or get tattooed or buy cigarettes. MY SHIRT IS PRACTICALLY OLD ENOUGH TO DRINK, PEOPLE.
Do I even know any songs from Like a Prayer besides "Like a Prayer"?
Jesus, I am old. I don’t feel old, though, which makes the passage of time even more alarming. I still feel the way I did when I was eight, just with more knowledge and better taste in clothing (those flowered culottes? thank god I didn’t keep those around for twenty years), and it makes me wonder if the arrested development thing I’ve got going on will eventually turn me into some analog of those nutters who go in for Botox and highlights every six weeks and wear their kids’ clothing. I already have an unholy addiction to the gym because I have an impossible, Sisyphean desire to look like I did when I was rowing in highschool, and I spend more money than God on fancy face cream so that I will never look in the mirror and see someone who is 28 till I’m forty.
But if I start taking a page out of the Madonna book, I give you all permission to smack me in my baby-ass-skinned face and tell me to knock it off. Because good old Madge looks like an alien whose human suit shrunk in the wash and doesn’t fit any more:
Madonna on her way back to the mothership
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