Its a confusing time for a man, the big three-o. A decade of reflection: right choices to celebrate, wrong ones to regret. New frontiers in pattern baldness and hangover management to discover. Its a time of assessment: “What is this path I am on, is it the right one? Is it the one I want to be on? What did I say I wanted to do when I grew up when I was 15? 18? 25? Am I doing anything remotely close to that now? We look around ( I use “we” with confidence, but really I mean “me” and assume others project then reflect through unfounded generalizations as I do)…ahem, we look around, see what others are doing or have done at the milestone birthday..and see where we match up.

My biggest measurement of achieving station at thirty was not income or status, or happiness (sadly) rather, it was a clear career direction. I’ve always figured the former will follow the latter. I also figure that if one spends his time chasing the latter (income & status) before securing a passion for the former…he may never find either. If I were, however, floating around in the wind, doing whatever to make enough money to afford either income or status, or nice plasma TVs like all my friends have, without this clear direction, I would consider fiscal responsibility higher in priority than clear career direction.
You see, this is why I believe now, through the luxurious lens afforded by hindsight, that 29 was a much heavier birthday than thirty. Although, I was a good 15 pounds heavier on my 30th birthday than my 29th, making it, technically a heavier birthday.

See, here’s me on my 29th. Look at me: in Austria, wearing a kilt, looking fit, working at my pub, The Lion Rampant (spelled this night by the dyslexic singer-songwriter, Mr. James Cottrail, “The Loin Rampant”, not on purpose. About to embark on Year 29– clearly lost career-wise. It was around this time, month 8 of my year-long post graduate-school-sojourn in Europe when I decided, “Shaan. You have a year to figure it out. You don’t want to be here a year from now working at a pub, wearing a dress, loins running rampant. That would be depressing.” So, to make things easier, I chose an easy path to career satisfaction–become a writer. *  Feeling like big steps at the time, but proving to be baby ones through the viewfinder of the Year-later Luxury-lens  I began to take steps to avoid the scheduled depression.

 * It’s difficult to intone sarcasm when writing, and stating, “this last thing that I wrote was sarcastic” stinks of bad writing, I think. However, this last clause: become writer=easy way to pave a clear career path…is certainly sarcastic.

Step One: write stuff.

This step proved then,  now, and most likely forever, the most difficult step. I know this from experience and from research. There are entire books written on the subject (The Idiot’s Guide to Avoiding Avoiding Writing). I’ve found one that’s good, The War of Art, by Steven Pressfield. He purports that creativity, like love, is a battlefield, and writer’s block is for weenies.

This is a picture of me sometime in month 1 of year 29, doing just that-avoiding writing. Writing, I have learned opens up new worlds of expression and distraction to a man. As you can see in the above photo, there are three emptied vessels of alcohol on my desk, one currently being emptied on my face, cigarettes to be smoked, digital picture and music collections to organize and endless hours to be wasted on the internet.

Writing about feelings is always an option. This however, I find somewhat redundant (feelings don’t seem to change a whole lot once you’ve covered the entire spectrum, and writing about them I find moderately more cliche than say, running off to Europe to smoke, drink, have rocky relationships, avoid responsibility, and become a writer).

Then I thought, “get a blog, write about your adventures over here, its good stuff, people will want to read it.” So I did for a bit, here’s my old blog, I thank the 9 of you who read it:

Admittedly, shaanspot is difficult to navigate, and if you’re really interested, you can read about some of my adventures  here on my shiny, new blog:  itsoktocryhere, under the category, BackwhenilivedinEuropeblog.

Anyway, So I wrote about my adventures on shaanspot for a few months, then stopped for about seven months or so, and didn’t write a thing. My feelings, it turns out got in the way. Sticking to the plan, I refused to write about them.

….exciting stuff, I know. There’s alot here. Alot more than I had planned on writing…so.  I’m going to break it up into blog posts. Stay tuned for Steps Two and Three of Thirty is Dirty….

Step Two: Get happy and stay that way at all costs

&

Step Three: Finding places and people to publish your writing, aka Being Lucky.

Thanks for reading