Release: Tami Devine

The first year I lived in Northampton I used to go to the Smith College library to check my email. One day in the early fall I was sitting at one of the computers when I noticed a familiar face two monitors. Well, I wasn’t actually confident about the familiarity so I logged into Friendster (remember that?) and did a search for Tami Devine who, sure enough, had just started a grad program at UMass-Amherst. I came over and whispered a one word question: “Bard?” It was that moment that we became good friends since, although we sat in the same row at commencement with the other D’s, we never hung out in college.  I miss Tami a lot. Her unique wit and elegance are almost from another era. Tami is one of a kind.

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For those of you Class of ‘99ers who are already thirty, I’m still 29, suckas! It will be that way until October, when I’ll join your pitiful ranks of over the hillers. The casual “checking people’s age out” and seeing where I stand has not left me. A lady on Judge Judy was a divorced mom of 3 at 22. My college buddy is a homeowner and mom at 30. My colleague is a 40 year old divorced mom looking for love on Match. My parents continue to evolve and seek enrichment in their employment and activities going on 60. These numbers, once so damning (remember the “old” Bard students who were like, 26?), now seem such useless measurements.

Thirty meant something different to our parents, who probably had babies + a house + a wedding ring and all that jazz. Thirty seemed to be the arbitrary “I’d like to married by...” date when I was a youngster playing Barbies. In my child mind, like that would give me a whole decade to spread my wings and establish a career for myself GUFFAW!!!! The cruelty of it all, if little me could see me now! I’m Masters degreed-out now, sometimes a caricature of the overqualified & mortified crowd. I’m working similar jobs to those I worked before my fancy degree. But you all know the story. We’re questioning it all. We want better. Some days I wonder why I didn’t go for my MRS degree ...hardy har. Like after all that angsty riot grrling, listening to PJ Harvey + reading bell hooks in coffeeshops, I like to think I’d make a pretty damn good SAHM.

A few years ago one of the issues I was struggling with was that I didn’t feel like an “adult,” and it was all tied up with how my parents kind of never let me be an adult. I won’t bore you with all that now. But I kept going back to that fetal position. While my friends were spreading their wings I was like just dipping my feet in adult life through sublets and vacuous pursuit of internships. There was always a feeling of “if I fail, I’ll just move back home.” I wasn’t really trying, I guess, the clicking life clock paralyzing me into a dull anxiety.

Well, while I wasn’t looking all that kind of Adultness happened to me. I stopped blocking my own life joy. Volleyball - I’ve loved you since age 12 - but art school and glam rock emo boyfriends made me feel like I was a dork for loving you. I got the courage to get out there + play because I LOVE IT. I got two cats, recently a dog, and all that “responsibility” I used to desperately dodge from, I now seem to crave. I’ve met my “Ken” of sorts. That warm glow of family is hard to trade in for some of the ugliness of younger days. But I haven’t said “I do”; and maybe the absence of anything carved into marble is a relief.

One night last summer, I pulled my car over to the side of Route 9 to remove a cat who was struck by a car to its woodsy grassy resting place. That *choice* of putting my compassion into action and experience the grief of the loss of life - whilst blocking traffic- was a poignant moment of connection to my adult self. I’ve had the mildest feeling that something pure and organic was flowing out of me - I didn’t feel like I was trying to be someone else. I’m hoping for the next decade to put that feeling of connection to my true self - and what I believe to be REAL in this world- into action less seldomly. I don’t want to be the passer-by.

“Release” has been my mantra over the past year, and I’ve felt really strongly like I am shedding skin, shedding stale friendships that no longer nourish me, holding me back in their superficiality. There are those who will be left behind in a cloud of smoke, never to be seen again, except in facebook land. As will you too—left behind as people move on, past you.

We couldn’t have imagined it back then, but this is what thirty looks like. I think I’m doing all right...and so are you.

The Embrace of 360 Degrees: Matt Dineen

The 360 Months zine is here! Replete with the stunning cover art by my sister Sarah Dineen, it contains 30 essays by 30 people sharing their thoughts about turning 30--in 72 pages. If you are in Philadelphia, come check out the zine release event at Wooden Shoe Books at 704 South Street at 7:00 pm.

Here is my essay from the zine in honor of today, my 30th birthday. Enjoy! Also, check back next week for the rest of the essays. I'll start posting the remainder on Tuesday. Thanks for reading!
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Life really does come full circle sometimes. I guess this is no surprise since our lives are not single linear journeys of constant progress. We are on a continuum that ebbs and flows and our personal histories often have the pesky tendency to repeat themselves. Our current selves are an amalgamation of all of our ups and downs, and the journey we’re on is a complex one.

On the cusp of 30, I feel like I’m 15 again. Half a lifetime ago I spent the summer washing dishes at Nonnie’s Country Kitchen in Orleans, MA—my first job. I was paid under the table, in cash, to scrape the remains of chocolate chip pancakes larger than my face, scrub lipstick stains off coffee mugs, and listen to the classic rock station that the sexist cook would sing along to all morning. It feels like yesterday.

Actually, it was yesterday.

I arrived at my new job to discover an envelope in the back room with my name scrawled in full-caps: MATT. It contained a (small) pile of 20 dollar bills for my previous week of labor. After counting the bills, I stuffed the envelope in my backpack, grabbed a glass of ice water, and squeezed into a fresh pair of bright-yellow dishwashing gloves. Something was different though.

Instead of elderly retirees filling Nonnie’s counter (and inhaling her second-hand Lucky Strike smoke), there were tables full of people gazing into laptop computers, sipping lattes and eating pasta salad. Instead of AC/DC and Van Halen on the transistor radio in the back, Modest Mouse and Arcade Fire were playing on an iPod through the surround-sound speakers of the café. Everything has changed. But as I stood in front of the industrial sink scrubbing lipstick off a coffee mug it hit me that, actually, everything has stayed the same. In one week, I will be a 30 year old dishwasher with a college degree.

How has my life reverted to this, 15 years later?

It would be pretty easy to wake up on the morning of my 30^th birthday in despair that my life is not going anywhere; paralyzed by an internalized classism, making me feel like an utter failure of a human being. Luckily, I have dedicated a lot of my time since school to analyzing, rejecting, and documenting alternatives to the dominant culture that defines people by what they do for money, first and foremost. I have spent more than half of a decade now interviewing activists and artists about the dilemma of following their passions, doing what they truly love, while surviving in a cutthroat capitalist society. So I have thought about this stuff a lot. 

Over the years, when people I meet ask me, “What do you do?” the answer is always complicated. “Well,” I’ll reply. “It depends what you mean.” We are all so much more than our wage jobs. We are complex, multidimensional creatures. And this should be celebrated.

As I approach 30, I think back to that requisite thought exercise throughout many of our childhoods: “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

Is this it? Am I grown up now? At one point, I wanted to be a professional baseball player. Apparently I told my mother (who was 29 when she had me) that I would become rich as a Major League star and buy her a house. She lovingly reminds me of this broken promise every now and then. Sorry mom!

It has been essential for me to talk to people who have spent their lives redefining what success means—prioritizing happiness and community over the accumulation of wealth and power. This is also true of the aging process.

In my mid- to late-20’s it was really inspiring to talk to people in their 30’s who were truly embracing getting older. Actually, I have found that if you ask people who have passed the 30 year milestone, almost across the board they will talk about how much better life is than in their 20’s. So why is it then that many twenty-somethings in our society are so scared of this moment?   

I wear a pin on my jacket that reads: “Growing up is awesome!” The person that created (and gave me) this pin explained that it was in response to the popular subcultural slogan: “Growing up is giving up.”

In a culture that fetishizes youth and perpetuates “glory days” mythology, that teaches us to fear and misunderstand the natural cycles of life, embracing one’s 30’s is a radical act. 

The vision I have for my 30’s is to actualize all of the things that I talked about doing in my 20’s. I want to take inspiration from, and further cultivate, the best aspects of my youthful past. Simultaneously, I want to learn from the mistakes I’ve made, the low points of my personal continuum. This is not to say that it will be easy or that history won’t continue to occasionally repeat itself. My life will inevitably come full circle once again, but I am hopeful for what the next 360 degrees holds for me. Turning 30 is awesome. I am not giving up.
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Matt Dineen lives in Philadelphia, where he turned 30 on April 7, 2011. Contact him at: passionsandsurvival(at)gmail(dot)com