T-33 Days

33 is my lucky number, and has been since Grant Hill's rookie year. He's such a cutie pie.

Now it's a mere 33 days until my 30th birthday. And for the first time in 30 years, I'm not exactly excited.

I'm more nervous than anything. And I can't quite articulate why.

It might have something to do with the list I made nearly 18 months ago, detailing what I meant to accomplish before the Big Day. To my great disappointment, I've only knocked about 4 things off the 19-item list. They've been good ones. I managed to get that passport, run what amounts to 2 marathons, pay off a massive amount of debt, and we even took that girlie weekend away. But it doesn't seem like enough.

Truly, I'm very hard to please and rarely ever satisfied. With myself or anyone else.

You'd think it would be pretty easy to become "notorious." Well, I've reached "infamous" among my coworkers, so at least I'm getting somewhere there. But I've given up numerous opportunities to go salsa dancing. More often than not, work gets in the way. That's a really lame excuse.

Learning ballet, tracing my lineage, traveling deep into Mexico and/or Europe...not at all. But the true failure is what should have been the easiest: a simple kiss under the pier at sunset. After all, up until 3 months ago, I lived right there by the beach.

But I think I gave up on that when I gave in to a man, nearly a year ago. Who, on our first date, told me I'd have to find someone else to do that with because he didn't like the beach. We would later go on to spend a lot of time near the beach, but never on it. He really hated sand. And in all the ways that he failed me, ways big and small, this is one of the most regrettable ones.

So I cheated myself out of that one, plain and simple. But I have 33 days to make it right.

The question is, will I? I guess I have to start auditioning willing participants.

Great. Because artificially constructing the backdrop for one great kiss doesn't destroy the romance completely, does it?

What a sad story.