Thirty sneaks up on you. When you're 25 it's impossibly far away; when you're 21 it's the same thing as having one foot in the grave. But one day at a time, it sneaks up on you. Suddenly you look up and you realize that the first album you bought is nearly two decades old, that the first song you slow-danced to is getting played on oldies stations, that for the first time in your life phrases like "low fat" and "coronary infarction" and "wine that costs more than $7 a bottle" are penetrating your consciousness.

So here I am, a freshly minted thirty year old and wondering how the hell I got here. Did I really spend four years in that dead-end job? Were those two years of grad school worth it? Most importantly, why did I spend so many years in relationships where there was absolutely zero chance of freaky circus sex? Suddenly there's a yawning chasm between where I stand now and what I've spent the last nine years doing, and from this side of the gorge it all looks pretty stupid. Those were the best years of your life, that little voice in the back of my head whispers. Why the hell did you waste them?

Of course, that little voice has the benefit of hindsight, while my younger self just knew that he needed a job, or was in love, or that moving a thousand miles to a city where his only contact was a rather erratic ex might turn out to be a good career move. Whether my younger self or current one is right remains to be seen; all that is known is that it's experience that will inform everything I do from here on out.

You can almost sense thirty sneaking up on you, if you try. You start making little changes as the days roll by on 29. Suddenly that beard you've been joking about since college seems like a good idea, in part because you look at your chin and start wondering if it's maybe a little weak. Stuff that you wouldn't dream of wasting money on before - frames for posters, for one - suddenly seems important. You start picking up your bedroom because, God forbid you get lucky one night, you don't want the woman you bring home to look at your place and decide that it's some sort of slacker haven. It happens. Watch yourself. You'll see the signs.

That's one of the most prominent symptoms of my own incipient slide into my next decade, to be honest: The sudden desire to keep my apartment neat. Now, this may have been due to the state in which I previously lived, sharing a house with three gentlemen who regarded throwing out a dirty napkin as tantamount to licking the Great Wall of China clean, but regardless of causality, the desire is there. There's a moment of what the litcrit boys call paralogy, and then suddenly it all changes.

That pair of socks you left in the middle of the floor last night stop being, well, a pair of socks on the floor that you'll get around to eventually and metamorphose into a nagging worry that sets your temples throbbing. You used to worry if someone would find your stash of weed, now you worry if the apartment complex maintenance crew is going to enter your apartment and decide that you're a slob. Deep down, you know that it matters less than a Norwegian rat's left buttock what the maintenance crew thinks of your housecleaning skills, but still, it gets in there and it gnaws.

Then there's the whole issue of women. Once upon a time the song "I'm An Adult Now" was funny, especially the line about how the lead singer "can't write songs about girls anymore, [he] has to write songs about women." Like the man says, "no more boy meets girl, boy loses girl, more like 'man tries to understand what the hell went wrong!'" Sadly, it's true. When you get near thirty, you're getting too old to screw around. Every flirtation suddenly takes on the faint whiff of "Is this a potential life partner," a pressure both parties can - or should - feel. Needless to say, in such instances the air of light, insouciant flirting tends to come to earth with a crash. The longer you wait to meet someone, the harder it is to meet someone, and the more you find yourself looking at different things.

For example, when I meet a woman whom I think is attractive, I find myself looking, not at her face (or her chest, you filthy-minded bipedal crustacean. Show some dignity, for God's sake), but rather a little lower. That's because before anything else happens, there's one question I need to answer, one that will determine all of my behaviors from that point forward.

That's right, my eyes now dart immediately to the left hand to see if there's a ring sitting on that finger. I can't remember ever worrying about that in college, or even in grad school, but now, suddenly "Is she married?" becomes a real concern. The ogling comes later; first I need to find out if I'm going to get slapped with a lawsuit by a jealous husband if I try a line. Those halcyon days when all I had to worry about was "A)getting beaten up by an angry boyfriend and B)discovering that the woman I was interested in was having her questioning phase that semester" are gone, long gone. Now they're just boring stories waiting to be converted into anecdotes when I hit middle age and begin my navel-gazing autobiographical novel. (Note: My first novel was published last year. It was about vampires blowing up large sections of Hartford, Connecticut. Anyone who thinks that's autobiographical needs help far, far more than I do.)

Thirty sneaks into your closet, too. One morning you wake up and that all-purpose suit (You know the one I mean - it handles weddings, bar mitzvahs, job interviews, funerals and company dinners because you're too damn poor and cheap to buy a second one) just doesn't cut it anymore. You want a second one, and a third, and maybe a fourth. This may be because you've noticed that folks in suits get better treatment during airplane travel than folks in black t-shirts and jeans, or it may be that you're simply suddenly embarassed that someone might see you wearing that suit to two functions in a row. Whatever. It doesn't matter. Suddenly you're dropping enough at the Men's Wearhouse to build them a Men's Shed, a Men's Deck, and a Men's Two Car Garage. Why? Because it suddenly, painfully makes sense to do so.

And let's not talk about furniture. Furniture is probably the worst of it, the single most concrete symbol (short of real estate, but let's face it, the geek job market is so transient that buying a house is a great way to lose money on closing costs, and that's it) that you have grown up. It starts when Rooms To Go starts mailing you credit card offers and instead of using them for kindling, you pause for a minute and say "Hmmm..." before throwing them on the fire. It continues the first time you look at the milk crates holding your records (and if you're turning 30 around now, you remember what records are) or the cinderblock and 2x4 bookshelves holding your video collection and say to yourself "God, that looks like crap." Where it ends God only knows, but odds are good that it makes a detour to Ikea at least once along the way. Personally, I'm figuring on getting a new sofa with this year's bonus from work, and if you'd told me ten years ago I'd ever type something like that, I probably would have attempted to drown you in cheap beer. These days, the beer I drink costs too damn much to drown anyone in; if you're going to submerge and asphyxiate, use the Diet Coke - it's cheaper.

Regardless of all the rambling, though, I'm thirty. Thirty. It's scary. Half my life is over, and I still haven't climbed a mountain, made my first million or had a torrid affair with a woman who's appeared on the cover of Premiere at any point. I look in the mirror and it's still the same old me, more or less - same bad haircut, same style, same person (well, different posture, but that's what physical therapy is for, after all) but somehow past an irrevocable marker. Thirty. The word itself is full of signs and portents; let's face it, no one every fought the Twenty Nine Years, Seven Months and Three Days' War. Intellectually, I recogzine that the milestone is artificial and the date is meaningless. Age advances a day at a time, after all, incrementally winding onward. Milestones are conveniences, that's all - but they're the conveniences we live by. And so, as I pass by this one without slowing down, I can only ask myself one question:

If this is what turning 30 does to me, what sort of self-indulgent crap will I be writing when I turn 40? God alone knows, but He's not telling - at least, not for another ten years.