The Best and Worst Things about Getting Older

You no longer have a "bedtime", which means that you can stay up as late as you want.

But if you stay up as late as you want, the next day you'll be like Frankenstein's monster and end up knocking people over and walking into walls, because that's what often happens when people are sleepwalking.

You can eat ice cream for dinner.

If you eat ice cream for dinner, you'll either obsess over the number of calories you just consumed or you'll spend the next two hours at the gym trying to make up for the fact that you ate ice cream for dinner.

You don't have to pretend to know how to dance at trendy night clubs where everyone else is dressed in tight clothes and you're wearing baggy clothes to cover up the fact that you kept eating ice cream for dinner.

You end up having to do the chicken dance at your friend's wedding, because apparently no one has the nerve to say to the bride and groom that the chicken dance is stupid. (And when was the last time you saw a chicken dance, anyway?)

You don't have to concern yourself with worries of who's going to invite you to your school's biggest dance.

You do have to concern yourself with all the invitations to your friends' engagement parties, weddings, and baby showers, while you are still single and continue to go on dates with guys you're not really interested in but you date because a small part of you is afraid that you'll never have your own engagement party, wedding, and baby shower.

You don't get carded if you want to buy alcohol.

It makes you wonder if you really look that old because no one asks to see your ID anymore, which makes you contemplate plastic surgery, except then you'll have to tell people that the only reason you got it was so that you would get carded when you buy alcohol.

You don't have to go to school anymore.

If you're like me and you choose to go to grad school, then you will be in school FOREVER. (Or at least, that's what it'll feel like.)

If you're optimistic or idealistic, then you can look at the successful people who are your age or younger than you and think, If they can do it, then so can I!

If you're pessimistic or as neurotic as I am, then you will look at those successful people who are your age or younger and think, Why is it that they're so successful and it took me more than a month just to figure out how to use all the apps on my cell phone?

It's my birthday today. I'm thirty-two years old. I realized that I'm the same age as several of the women in the romantic comedies that I like to watch, like Carrie Bradshaw in the first season of Sex and the City and Bridget Jones. I don't have the kind of life that so many of them lead, though, partly because they apparently only spend about 10% of their time working and the rest of the time obsessing over the hot guys that love them for who they are and not for the fact that they're ten years younger than the guys or the fact that they're a size two (in Carrie's case, not Bridget Jones').

I'm not where I thought I'd be at age thirty-two (married with kids, successful, and at least ten pounds lighter), but on the other hand, at least I'm living in a city that I love, I haven't given up writing (my last act as a thirty-one-year-old was to submit a story I wrote to a literary magazine), and I refuse to "settle" for a guy just so I won't have to be alone. I'm living my life on my terms, despite the fact that there are still several people who try to get me to live, work, and date the way they want me to. And that is something.

But I still wouldn't mind meeting a great guy who doesn't mind the fact that I'm in my thirties (so many guys my age or older only want to date women in their twenties, though I know not all of them are like this) and also doesn't mind the fact that I will never be a size two. Maybe I'll meet him before my thirty-third birthday. Here's hoping!

What about you? What do you think are the best or worst things about getting older?