And then on December 6th . . . .

. . . I was irretrievably adrift in my thirties with only my wit and a bowie knife to save me.

No, seriously, this may be some sort of anomaly, but I really have virtually no opinion on my now being thirty. It seems like a non-event, but the cliche is that when leave your twenties behind you should have some sort of crisis of identity that inevitably leads toward a Razor's Edge-esque experience that somehow enlightens you and fills you with the secret to how to be content in life.

But I've read The Razor's Edge. And it was good - actually, it was really good - but it didn't inspire me to move to Tibet and become a Lama. And since the main soul searcher in that book lived an impoverished-yet-content life, pining over the woman he had loved as a youth (which seemed like he might have had a strange definition of what the "content" life was,) I'm not really "down" with using that particular book as a manual on how to live a happy life . . . .

Sylvia Path once journalled (when she wasn't busy calling her father a "bastard" and killing herself,) "I may never be happy but for tonight I am content." Despite the fact that I really dislike her, I've always really loved the sentiment in that . . . of course she said this after having spent a day picking strawberries AND she was obviously insane. Now though, when I think about her saying that, it seems to me that maybe she's a little too preoccupied with hammering herself up on the cross and should possibly have gone and seen a psychotherapist instead.

I'm circling a point here. It's amazing to me there aren't any manuals on how to live a life. There's no one that can tell you how to do what you have to do.

Someone inevitably will say "Church," but my own good sense won't let me buy into that. Everything my intuition about the world tells me personally is that if there was ever a God, he threw up his hands and walked away from us all a long time ago. Is that a first? Is it possible to believe in God and still not have faith? Well, I'm sure its not a first, but I'm not sure how it fits.

Maybe the key to contentment is guided and structured disinterest. Blinder yourself to the world and watch more television? No. The writers are still on strike, so that's not an option either.

Milan Kundera wrote my favorite book ever: "The Unbearable Lightness of Being." He opens with a fairly long discussion on philosophy, but he comes quickly to his point and then drives it home a few times: "the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air . . . his movements as free as they are insignificant." The "absolute absense of a burden" in question here is the horrible fact that each life is unique, only occurs once, and is not weighed down with the "weight" of repetition. There's no dress rehearsal for life, so you have no way of knowing if you're doing it right or not, knowing which decisions are the correct decisions. He's flirting with nihilism, but never quite swoops to that, and its a beautiful book. He never comes to an answer either, except to say that the lack of importance to any single life is "unbearable.' And there's a lot of sex in the book too.

No, I'm flagrantly apathetic about turning thirty, because of its infinitesimal non-importance.

Thanks to all the well-wishers yesterday. I appreciated it. I think I'll look forward to my thirty-first birthday next year. Anyone up for a party?

Note to Jill - you're out there somewhere and you read palms for shit. Clearly, I'm not dead. : P

And a tip o' the hat to Tracy - Thanks for spamming my cube, but how'd you know about Kate?