I’ve been 30 for a whole week. Thirty. Years. Old.  Thir-ty. There’s something about the number 30 in relation to years lived that makes a lot of people squirm (mostly people under the age of 30). It is a milestone that feels significant and insignificant all at once. It feels insignficant in perspective. I understand now that three decades isn’t as long a time as it seemed when I was 10. It is, in theory, only a small portion of one person’s life. On a larger scale, 30 years barely registers as a drop in the bucket of history.  On the counter, turning 30 feels significant because of all the things I learned in the last decade. The best way to describe my 20’s is: it was a process. A process of learning, experiencing, and knowing. It was mostly a process of figuring myself out. Parts of that process were ugly, miserable, and downright lonely. They were also painfully necessary. It was like going on a Bear Hunt:

It’s a strange thing, belonging to two communities. Growing up in California with my mom’s family meant the pacific half of my blood had a minimal impact on my upbringing. Partly because my dad grew up a member of the generation that was taught to de-emphasize their culture in order to fit in. Partly because my dad’s family was only an occasional presence — a voice on the phone in the middle of the night or a fun stranger who came to visit for a couple of weeks. I’ve discovered the values my siblings and I were raised with are in essence, the same or similar to pacific values (clearly, my parents saw eye-to-eye on that front). Shared values is the main reason I think I’ve been able to — assimilate isn’t quite the word — insert myself relatively seamlessly into the pacific community (insert isn’t quite right either, but you get the point). Entering the pacific community

Everyone knows that life in Southern California is an endless parade of sunny skies and mild winters that are the envy of every snow-bound resident in the country. Lately I’ve been wishing for a cold gray sky. Just one. Even sunshine becomes monotonous with time. It’s winter for crying out loud. We get shorts-and-tshirts weather at least once every month of the year. Happily, today was that wished-for day. The leaf-less trees stood dark against the stark gray, all was right and wintery.