It's been 20 days since my 30s came to an end, and I'm doing surprisingly well. While there have been ups and downs, overall it's not too bad (aside from the stray grey hairs that are popping up in my dark brown eyebrow arch above my left eye, making it look like I've had some sort of tweezing accident). But hey, I'll take stray grey eyebrows over grey head hair any day, so I'll just shut up.
Here's the top 10 things I've learned since turning 40:
1) Celebrations for milestone birthdays (like 40, 50, 60, etc) that result in gifts like candles from CVS purchased minutes before gift-giving do NOT go over well. I mean, even though Molly Ringwald got no gifts in "16 Candles," she ended up with Jake Ryan and that awesome dining room table kiss.
2) Kind friends and family (and contrite spouses) will make enormous efforts to amend disappointing birthday celebrations, particularly if you have a spectacular meltdown in your bedroom.
3) Although it may be necessary to stand on your concert seat to get a better view of the stage, it's not worth getting into a fight with a posse of younger, skinnier bitches in the row behind you at a Kelly Clarkson concert, even if your husband has your back. I'm just sayin'.
4) Sometimes, jumping in the car and going to Reading, PA on a whim, to watch "professional" wrestling can be a great way to spend a Saturday night.
5) The office douchebag who tries to rationalize why he can't perform basic office maintenance tasks (ie, "you should be responsible for changing the toner in the copier, Maria, since your stuff was the last stuff that printed") should be ignored. That is, until you openly mock his arrogance to female coworkers behind his back.
6) Too much AXE cologne really, no REALLY, hurts the nasal passages and basically torpedoes your chance of hooking up (do people still call it "hooking up?") with others.
7) People who say "anyhoo" or (even worse, use it as part of a facebook status) should be immediately defriended without explanation.
8) Husbands who offer to make their kids' lunches are viewed as exponentially more sexy to tired working moms than those men who couch on the sofa watching repeats of "Storage Wars."
9) You're never to old to snuggle with your kids, although they will definitely be too old one day to want to snuggle with you.
10) Trying to beat the computer in two consecutive games of Scrabble is in an exercise in futility, especially at 2 in the morning. Also, note to some, when playing on the Kindle, the computer takes the name AI (as in artificial intelligence), not Al (as in short for Alfred). It took me about three weeks of playing before I realized that.
More wisdom later...
