Some of my new students ask me my age. I explain, "My birthday is next week. I'll be thirty." A lot of them look surprised. They say I look 25 or 26.

Nobody likes a kiss-ass.

But I like when they say that. I jokingly tell them they've just earned themselves an A plus. Sure, I wonder if they mean it, but it sounds good whatever the motivation. Is this cheap flattery going to become more important to me now, now that I'm, Good Lord, turning thirty?

  *

A lot of people I've asked about turning thirty say that nothing changes. I feel good hearing that. Things are good the way they are. 

But do I trust them? After all, they have to believe that. Consider the alternatives:

1) Things get worse. Too scary to contemplate, which leads to...

2) Things get better. As nice as it sounds and as much as I want to believe it, nobody, not even the Mighty Jeff Lebow, has been able to convince me of this. Even I, who at one time convinced myself of the unassailable chic of parachute pants and the supremacy of the Buffalo Bills, am having a tough time convincing myself on this one. I realize that this increased skepticism and adherence to reason may itself be a sign of "things getting better", but in the final analysis, what amounts to an inability to believe in Santa Claus doesn't seem to constitute much of an improvement. Which leads to...

3) Things stay the same. Much easier to swallow. I have a feeling I'll wake up on Monday and the earth will still be rotating on its axis. The sun will be well up in the sky. My house will be an unholy mess from the weekend. I'll put on a dirty shirt and forget to brush my teeth. Nothing will have changed.
 

  What Changes...
 

This has been on my mind lately, and I've been asking some of my seniors to share some wisdom with me. An old friend, also staring thirty in the face, recently shared a mantra with me, "I'm younger now than I'll ever be again." Haven't tried it yet, but I like the idea. A few weeks ago, I met Jeff Lebow for a beer, and we talked about it. He said, "A lot of things get better when you're thirty."

"Like what?" I asked.

"Well, there's, uh..." maybe Jeff had so many wonderful things to tell me that he didn't know where to begin. Or it could be that the truth is as ominous as I'd feared: There is nothing to look forward to, no silver lining in this dark cloud, just a steady downhill ramble into death, which looms ever closer.

Still, Jeff seems to have made peace with it. Just couldn't say how. 

Okay, at least one thing has changed for the better: Quite often I notice that I seem to know what I'm doing these days. Which is not the same as actually knowing what you're doing, but it's a very useful skill to at least seem that you do.

I can tolerate quantities of alcohol that would have hospitalized me when I was 18. Which isn't good or bad, but again, useful sometimes. Especially here, where a lot of the booze is served in a shotglass.

One of the really scary things I've noticed about being almost-30 is that I'm becoming more like my parents. Not that they're bad people, quite the contrary. It's just that they're, well, my parents. For example, sometimes my friends ask me for advice, and I find myself saying things my parents might have said.

Or, they don't ask me for advice and I give them some anyway. Again, just like my parents.

My twenties are winding down. Is this why I've been a raging party animal these past few weekends? Going out 'til 6, 7, 8 in the morning, just to know that I can still do it?

Well, no. I've always done that.

It's nice to walk into the bar with a little wisdom and size up the scene, "This one's looking for a fight, this one's full of shit, this one's cool, and this one's good to go." I couldn't do that when I was 21. My eyes were too full of smoke.
 

...And what doesn't
 

I remember talking to one of my uncles about turning thirty (I was about 24 at the time). He said that at some point, younger women (the early twenty-somethings) stop noticing you, you become, not an old man, but something else in their eyes, out of the game. Benched by popular demand (or lack thereof). As a foreigner in Korea, almost everybody notices me. That used to bug me, but I'm learning to appreciate it.

Still, why do my early-twenty-year-old students laugh every time I pull into campus on my scooter? Scooters were considered quite dorky where I grew up. There was a terrible joke about them, how riding a scooter was like having sex with a really fat woman: It's a lot of fun, just don't let your friends catch you. 

That was the last word on scooters in suburban New York, but here scooters are quite normal, occasionally even rising to the level of cool. So why are they laughing? Because I'm their teacher? Because I'm a foreigner? Or do they see me as too old? 

Why should a stupid birthday make me feel any different? I feel the same as I did last week. Better actually, probably because the weather's much more agreeable. I don't even look much different. I've been studying my face in the mirror lately, and the face I see looks more or less the same as the one I've always seen. There's a bit more hair on it these days, but I still can't grow a full beard.

I've accumulated a fair amount of experience, but in many ways I'm still as clueless as I ever was. I still don't know what I want to be when I grow up. My grandmother said the same thing at age 70. Maybe it's genetic.

When I was twenty-one, it seemed to me that the thirty-year-olds I knew had their shit mostly together. I guess they did, and so do I, if having your shit together means simply doing a job well and enjoying life, not wanting for anything, making your own way however you do it. Sure, I've got my shit together. 

But the questions, big and small, remain. Where am I going? And who am I anyway? When the hell am I going to go out and buy a cookbook so I can eat something other than instant noodles, PB and J, and stir-fried rice?
 

Getting Older (Before My Time) in Korea
 

I remember hearing one of those Chinese four-character sayings: Great wisdom matures late, which inspired a little four-word ditty of my own: I love the Chinese. They're always doing things to make older people feel important. How many times have I told you to bow to your grandfather, dammit?!

Confucian respect for age is mostly very cool to me, but I suspect that being thirty wouldn't seem so bad if I weren't constantly reminded of it. Any time you meet someone in Korea who is close to your age, they want to know your age right away, so they know whether to call you hyoungnim (senior) or dongseng (junior), and so they know how to decline their verbs to indicate proper respect. In short, you often need to know a person's age if you want to talk to them at all. I'm forced to say it all the time, "I'm thirty. I'm thirty. I'm thirty, for Christ's sake."

My friend and I recently met a Korean guy in a bar. He was the same age as Andy, and two years younger than me. He said to Andy, "we are "friends", but he (Indicating me) is "Hyoung"". Gee, thanks a lot, man. I know what he meant by it, but my fast-approaching birthday has made me a wee bit sensitive to comments like that.

In Korea, you are considered one year old at birth, and you gain a year (along with everyone else) every Lunar New Year's Day. So your "Korean age" is always at least one year ahead of your "international" or "Western" age. I've always found this strange and interesting, and it turned out to have a cool side effect: I got to be thirty last year when I knew in my Western heart I was only 29. It was like having a trial run, a little time to get used to the sound of saying, "I'm thirty years old." Turns out I didn't much like the sound of it, but the dress rehearsal seems to have taken some of the edge off. 

Age in Korea is a big deal. Usually too big for me, but it's nice to think I can grow old here and still get some respect, even live with my kids if I need to. I'd get seats on the bus, cut the line at the bank, and shove people out of my way on the street. Not bad. Better than the retirement scene in Florida anyway. 
 

The Well-meaning Stupidity of Twenty-somethings and the Significance of the Number Thirty
 

The 30th birthday is, if nothing else, a contemplative time for a lot of people. Other people never really face it. They prefer the phrase "the Big Three-oh", which their friends adopt out of respect for the victim's increased sensitivity to the word "thirty". Zsa Zsa Gabor probably tells herself every morning that she's still 29 (which isn't a tough sell--she has a surgically rejuvenated face and is wise beneath her years). 

But many people come to grips in one way or another. Whatever happens, there's a lot of introspection going on, and the end result of that reflection is often, if not true self-knowledge, the crossing of some sort of threshold that sets you apart from the people you left on the other side.

Twenty-somethings have absolutely no sympathy. They don't understand, they think they'll be twenty-something forever. They get edgy when they hit 27 or 28, but even then they don't really get it.

Well-meaning twenty-somethings like to say that thirty is "just a number". But 21 is just a number too, as are 16 and 65, but they all mean something where I grew up, especially if you want to get drunk, drive a car, and collect Social Security, in that order. These numbers have meaning, and just because those meanings are arbitrarily assigned and not intrinsic to the number itself doesn't make a difference to me. Thirty has a meaning too, maybe even an intrinsic one. After all, there's that big fat "3" in the tens column where a 2 once stood for a blissful decade. Nobody needs to tell me that something weird is going on there.

So what does it mean? Maybe thirty means that I can't blame my fuck-ups on being young anymore. When you're thirty, people expect certain things of you, like wearing clean shirts, not belching into microphones, putting the toilet seat up when you take a leak. Doesn't matter how young you feel, that number says to some people that they have a right to expect you to "act your age."

They may be right for thinking that, but screw them anyway. Those people are usually no fun at parties, and they're sure as hell not invited to mine.

  *

I'm throwing a party on the weekend of the big day. I'm not upset about my birthday, but I still want to enter my thirties the same way I entered my twenties--stinking drunk. I told my friends they might have to carry me. Fair warning. Would somebody just guide my face into the toilet? Above the waterline, please. I may be an old man, but I'm not ready to cash in my chips just yet.