Where's My Stuff?

So... today is my 30th birthday. It's a milestone, and milestones are good for sitting on, while resting one's tired feet and peering lazily into the distance to see just how far you've come. Bob Dylan said "don't look back" (or was that D.A. Pennebaker? Incidentally, Pennebaker's birthday is tomorrow. Even more incidentally, Cameron Crowe's birthday was yesterday.). At any rate, what the feck does Bob Dylan know? It's not like he's accomplished anything noteworthy.

Speaking of accomplishments, I have to say I'm feeling kind of gypped. Here I am, already thirty years dead, and what do I have to show for myself? Like most of my generation, I grew up watching unprecedented amounts of television, and all of that technologically enhanced cultural indoctrination led me to believe that I could expect some pretty exciting nonsense from life.

I mean, here I am, three quarters of the way to over-the-hill, and I have yet to do any of the following things:

• I never threw a raging part y while my parents were away for the weekend, and just managed to get things cleaned up before they came home.
• When I was in high school, I never got partnered with a girl in my health class, whom I couldn't stand, and then had to babysit an egg for a week like it was our progeny.
• I've never volunteered to take a single mom to lamaze class.
• I've never pretended to be the fiance of a beautiful foreign acquaintance/co-worker so that she could get her green card.
• I've never taken care of a neighbor's pet while they were on vacation, accidentally killed it, or let it run away, and then replaced it with a look-alike before they got back.
• I have never sustained a playfully adversarial and sexually charged long term social relationship with a woman whom I refer to by her last name, and whom everyone knows I will eventually end up with, even though everyone also knows that getting together will mean horrible ratings and canceling the show.
  
• I've never even been caught in an implausible scenario where I'm forced to pass the time by reminiscing with my companions in a series of picture perfect flashbacks that play a lot like a demo reel of my best-moments-since-last-season.

Maybe in another ten years, I will have checked some of these off the to-do-before-I-die list. I'm just glad I didn't grow up watching reality TV.