Noun Verb Kimchi: Part 10

Written by Clayton Foster

Arriving home, getting old.

I’m standing outside the Auckland International airport arrival gates.  It’s 12.35pm, I calculate that I haven’t slept in about 30 or 40 hours.  I took Valium at the start of the journey (actually, after I downed a couple, I noticed it was labeled Velium, and I started to suspect my over the counter purchase of unpackaged medications in Laos as shockingly suspect), but a particularly insistent chorus of four or five crying infants on the plane had defeated even modern pharmacology.  Now, with the hangover of unsatisfying sleep-inducing chemicals and routine jetlag fizzing around my blood, I was less victorious returning traveller, more George Romero zombie.

Also, I’m alone.

Things that tend to end less spectacularly than they began: life, love, travel.

All three are on my mind, chasing each other around my cerebral cortex like 1930’s cartoon animals in an endlessly repeating animation loop.

It can’t be helped - I landed in my homeland a mere week before my thirtieth birthday, two events which come loaded with so much pre-cooked weight and significance that it’s difficult to know where to start to examine it all, and whether or not it’s even advisable to do so.
It was planned that way, of course - the timing of the two events, I mean - and in my mind I pictured triumphant homecoming parades to cheering crowds watching me as I drove by perched upon the back seat of a Cadillac, banners madly waving with “Welcome Home!” on one side and “Happy 30th!” on the other.  All, for some unspecified reason, shot in hiccupping black and white and narrated by one of those old newsreel guys: Here he comes now - the supertoast of this supercity!  And, look, here are the dancing girls!  Dah dah dah DAHDAHDAH...

However.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but sometimes the things in your brain don’t always match up with the things in your eyes.

So here I am, waiting at the arrivals lounge alone, one of those sad, confused-looking home comers with no-one to pick them up, because my flight had landed early and caught my family unawares.  I’m also thirty, unemployed, broke, homeless and single.  Or, I’m in the prime of my youth, uncommitted and unattached, a rocket ship on my way to Mars, that’s why they call me Mr. Fahrenheit, etc... It all depends, after all, on where you stand, how much you tilt your head like this, squint your eyes just so, and stick out your tongue at just the right angle.  Am I anchorless, living a life devoid of any significant meaning beyond transitory, fleeting connections?  Or am I free?  But then, isn’t freedom, as it has been said and sung, just another word for nothing left to lose?

Thirty.  It’s not the ever-increasing number that’s worrying me.  Age is easy enough to put in perspective/lie to yourself about.  It’s the daily reminders that occur outside of yourself that really drill home how old you’ve let yourself get.  I’m used to telling kids about the first time I saw the internet (I was about 14, my Social Studies teacher took us in small groups to the school library where we sat in awe while we watched a jpeg image of Jerry Seinfeld take about 90 seconds to load).  I’d even gotten used to teaching young ‘uns about the first Iraq war with the introduction, “Before you were born...”

However, there was something about being told, via Facebook automated pop-up, that my first girlfriend, who I had been involved with about the same time as spotty teenagers were watching slow loading Seinfeld images, was about to turn 29.  In my mind, she was still 17, coolly holding her voice steady on the other end of the line while I went through the extreme adolescent freak-out that was my first ever break-up.  Or, perhaps weirdly, when I recently heard that a Freddie Mercury biopic had been green-lit, heralding the first significant autobiographical film to be made about a childhood icon (don’t judge, Queen were awesome in the ‘80s).  Hence the rocket ship line three paragraphs ago.

Maybe it’s because turning thirty is your first real taste of getting older.  Up until thirty, the whole concept of actually aging is like the greenhouse effect; you know it’s happening, you know it’s going to be bad, but you just can’t see it enough to really motivate yourself to worry about it yet.

Maybe it’s because F. Scott Fitzgerald said: “Thirty—the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning briefcase of enthusiasm, thinning hair."  Though I have the advantage over him of not being a raging alcoholic, he wins on the count of my also not being one of the greatest 20th Century American writers (in my defense, I don’t feel I was ever really given a fighting chance, and I’m sure my Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fan-fiction I wrote when I was 12 was just waiting for the right audience to discover it).

You see, that’s how old I am.  I can make references to the first time the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were popular.

But really, it’s not the age in isolation that is the problem.  Being one step closer to my inevitable demise has never really bothered me (as it is, life is already a lot like an episode of Lost - quite a bit of filler and a more than enough pointless running around).  The problem is how we view these milestones and how we use them to pass judgments on where we are in our lives.  For example, I’m one of the last of my closest friends to buy a house, and I’m about as likely to do that as I was when I was writing that fan fiction (I swear, those stories were woefully under-appreciated by the uncivilised hordes).
For as Lew Wallace said, "A man thirty years old, I said to myself, should have his field of life all ploughed, and his planting well done; for after that it is summer time."  The only reassurance I can find is that I don’t actually know who Lew Wallace is, and so can completely ignore his admonitions and gardening advice (internet research reveals him to be a 19th Century Union general in the American Civil War, and author of the original novel upon which Ben Hur was based).

Eventually my family arrives.  I haven’t seen them for a year, and it’s good.  Over the next few days, I catch up with old friends, and in five days pull together a 30th birthday party in Auckland, that saucy old minx I haven’t seen for a while, but who remains strangely enticing in that lumbering, heavy-handed way of hers.  In the days leading up to the party I consider cancelling it multiple times - most of these people haven’t seen me for over 15 months, and here I am demanding their Saturday night at short notice.  But I don’t cancel, and enough people come, and it’s good.  And while I’m standing among the small crowd of similarly aged peers, some married, some engaged, some resolutely single, some with mortgage, some without, some with jobs they love, a lot with jobs they tolerate, I realise that it’s good.  Good to be home, good to be 30.

And I realise it’s okay to not have everything figured out, or indeed anything at all.  Because as (early 20th Century French statesman) Georges Clemenceau said, "Everything I know I learned after I was thirty".

Hopefully that includes properly checking the label on over-the-counter pills in Laos.