The WordPress social services is going to come and take my blog away.  I am guilty of neglect, of the most benign kind, but neglect is neglect no matter how you want to sugarcoat it.  The issue is not that I do not love my blog; it is that I am a college student again and I am very busy trying to remember how to use that part of my brain that has been dormant for many, many years.  So please forgive me, and I will consent to going to blog caretaking classes–oh wait, my classes are all English classes, so they are, in a sense, blog caretaking classes.  Will that hold up in WordPress social service court?

I don’t have much time but I had to get back on here.  I’ve faced a birthday milestone this week, and I was thinking how I coped in different ways.  I stayed busy, I read the stream of well wishes on Facebook through out the day, I was cheered with phone calls from family and friends.  I spent time with my family, who cooked for me and gave me presents and love.  I ate well and drank just enough, not as much as you might think.  And for a good bit of the day, I thought of how many other life experiences have been worse than reaching forty.  So I present to you now, my list of:

 Things I Have Faced That Are Worse Than Turning Forty: 

1. Going back to college with kids young enough to be my children

2. Pain of childbirth (yes, even with the drugs)

3. Getting dumped by boyfriends

4. Sorority effing rush

5. Listening to that song Fireflies by Owl City

6. Eating escargot at prom

7. Getting hit (accidentally) by a baseball bat in the mouth in elementary school

8. Wearing, at the same time,  purple eyeshadow, pink lipstick and a home-permed mullet in the 80’s

9.  Being forced to fire a guitar teacher over the Georgia/Clemson rivalry

10.  Throwing up in the ski lift line at Beech Mountain as a teenager (for the record, I was sick, not drunk)

11.  Annual trips to the gynecologist

12. Biannual trips to the dentist

I could go on and on.  There really are so many more things worse than turning 40:  Terminal illness, sex slavery, communism, John Edwards, clitoridectomies (thanks, David Sedaris- see Me Talk Pretty One Day), Priscilla Presley’s plastic surgery.  And so, right or wrong, I feel so much better about myself, and my crow’s-feet, and my aches, pains and creaks.  I also know that while I may have looked cuter in my 20’s, I am a better person at 40.  And that comforts me as well.

“There isn’t one of these lines that I would erase…” -Jennifer Nettles/Bon Jovi, “Who Says You Can’t Go Home”

“I will get by, I will survive…” -The Grateful Dead, “Touch of Grey”