I’m going to sign a separation agreement with my husband tomorrow. There’s a drab little form that I found online; he downloaded it for $68 and will punch in the material details of our lives in the morning. We’ll take it to a notary on 31st St, and I’ll carry a copy on a plane to London next week.

The form doesn’t say anything about an 18-year-old heart speeding up at the sight of a boy with tobacco-brown eyes. It seems to be missing the section on best friends huddling under four sweaters each and a duvet as they watch TV and drink red wine in a freezing college house in Dublin. No space for notes on two wobbly, handholding RollerBladers ending up in a sprawl of elbows and skinned knees. There’s no worksheet for dividing up mistakes, but nor do we get line-item deductions on in-jokes and joy.

Maya Angelou described coming home after her husband left their house for the last time to find that he had left her favorite meal warm in the oven—roast chicken and new bread, with a bottle of wine on the table. I would like to do the same for Jason, my J. But instead I tell him not to wear that new rice-pudding-colored shirt on dates. It doesn’t do him justice either.

Quoted in Andrew Solomon’s The Noonday Demon, which is wonderful.

The invitation to my party on Sunday read:

About half-way through the evening, Bill the Bartender brought over a round of birthday shots and I proposed a toast to my loyal friends. Who said:

   ‘Oh wow, it’s your birthday? We wondered why you said ‘No gifts’. What age are you?’
    ‘Um, thirty. As in, version 3.0…’

Teetering in my little black dress and heels, I felt about as socially well-adjusted as Bill Gates. Even the engineers hadn’t got it.

I’m obsessed with dates and numbers. At eleven, it was the Year Two Thousand. What would I be doing then, at 28? I could clearly remember my mother’s 28th birthday. I had notions of striding confidently with a briefcase somewhere, though I wasn’t sure what a briefcase might contain since my teacher parents used oversized schoolbags to carry copybooks for correction.

    ‘I think I might be a scientist,’ I told our neighbor, Seamus Seery.
    ‘What kind of scientist? There are all kinds of different science. Physics? Chemistry?’

This hadn’t occurred to me. I was stumped. 28-year-old me continued to stride through my imagination, not an Air Hostess or a teacher but not quite anything else either, yet. She wasn’t married. God, no. She wouldn’t get married until at least thirty, and then her husband would do the washing up. At 28, she would travel and have love affairs and full bouncy hair. She would live in a flat and wear nice makeup. She would not go to Mass.

The Year Two Thousand was so powerful then that I didn’t think much about thirty, which was less glamorous. The traveling might stop for a while as I puttered in my perfect home and reared my kids. The briefcase would still be there. 30-year-old me would be untroubled by feelings and would not make mistakes.

Zero-birthdays are disconcerting; a summing-up and a beginning. They’re a border to which you bring your papers to be stamped. Ma’am, your figuring-things-out visa has expired. Is everything in order with your love, family, friends, career, spirit, body, home, money? Or do you need to apply for an extension?

Thirty, in particular, is freighted with ‘supposed-tos’ for those who think about such things. Some people take it as a spur to build. They get engaged, start a company, or have babies. Older and younger friends smirk at the burst of activity. Others, like me, tear things down at the sight of that big round zero hurtling down the hill towards us, gathering dread and longing. We’re no longer automatically the youngest in the room. At work, the formless class of ’94 now divides into contenders and schmoes. We slide from mentored to mentor, just as we realize we know nothing at all. We discover a god-shaped hole in lives that are no longer endless. We throw wobblers and chuck out our adult paraphernalia at the thought.

    ‘I can’t believe I have a 30-year-old daughter,’ Mum blurted this morning. Me neither. Unaccountably I am closer to my eleven-year-old self than to the cool Amazon of my early imagination.

Saturday was moving day. I can’t drive and had never moved house by myself before so I hired a sketchy man-with-van outfit. Conscious of the $65 hourly charge, I schlepped all my boxes down to the curb under the gaze of the upstairs neighbors. The Ecuadorian drivers parked at the end of the street, strapped on weight-lifting belts and we began to load the rickety truck. The load looked pathetically small when we’d finished.
   ’You sure this is it, lady?’

I begged them to let me ride in the truck with them to Queens. I was too cheap to spring for car service and certain they would never find my sister’s house otherwise. There were only two seats, but finally they gave in and we squeezed in. We chatted about the World Cup. They asked where I’d learned my prissy Castilian lisped Cs and Zs.
    ‘Irlanda? Del sur o del norte?’
    ‘De la republica. Del sur.’
Gravely, they congratulated me on Ireland’s victory draw against Germany. I wished them luck against Mexico.

In Astoria, we parked at the end of the road again and began to unload. They humored me as I gasped under tiny loads and overtook me carrying four times as much.
   ’These boxes are all books? You read too much,’ said Carlos wiping away sweat.

In forty five minutes, everything I owned was in Claire’s apartment. Carlos looked around as he totted up the bill.
   ’Well,’ he said in Spanish and shook his head. ‘You had a beautiful apartment before, but I hope you will be happy here.’

At Brighton Beach, a fisherman caught a huge striped bass. I’m a poor judge of fish weight, but it was the length of his thigh and it glinted silver from a hundred yards away. A knot of rubberneckers gathered to gawp at the body. From down the beach, a tall pink man in small black Speedos strolled towards the crowd, blowing a whistle and waving. People got edgy. Were they were allowed to be out on the spit? He started talking to the Hmong fisherman, who spoke no English. The fish was handed over and the fisherman backed away. Something was off. Where, I wondered, did this cop keep his badge in his ridiculous banana hammock? His breath smelled of vodka, and the crowd slowly sussed him out for the drunk Russian bully that he was.

Indignation knows no national boundaries. The bully was routed. He gave the bass back to the little fisherman, and swaggered back to his backpack down the beach. He stood there, drinking from a brown-bagged bottle. With two naked fingers, he fired idly at the dwindling crowd.

The charming Rem Reynolds gives me the address of his friend Porter, who has a gig writing for Cambodia Daily in Pnomh Penh. I write to ask his advice on my upcoming trip, and include a link to this site. His reply is filled with Southern tact:

‘I checked out your web site. Seems like you’re
having a time figuring out what to bring. I’d
recommend visiting an Army-Navy surplus store. The
gear is cheaper and less flashy, making you less of a
mark for harassment (not serious harassment, just
would-be guides, drivers, salesmen, etc). Just a
thought, probably too late.’

I’m cringing. Shoe-shopping is a tic, a form self-medication more benign than bourbon. The grail: a sexy summer shoe that doesn’t create blisters like puff adders and that makes me feel like a cross between Audrey Hepburn and Amelia Earhart. It’s just a distraction from the bureaucracy of trip planning, and from my current perch here on this glamorous little rock, it seems entirely forgiveable. But yes, it must seem utterly daft to the likes of Porter, writing from a town where people have nothing.

- Virginia Woolf to her sister
My mother went to St. Camillus’s hospital for a week in 1978. She brought home Claire.

At the time, the change in the dinner routine excited me more than the mewling bundle in the maternity ward. In the months beforehand, Mum had cooked individual dinner portions and frozen them in little tinfoil containers with paper lids. ‘Stew’. ‘Shepherds Pie’. ‘Chops’. Every day Mum was away, Dad defrosted two of these meals and heated them in the oven. I was almost six and had never eaten take-away food; this was close enough to be an adventure.

Not as much of an adventure as getting to know my sister Claire turned out to be. She’s two elegant inches taller than me, and twice as well put-together. I preen shamelessly when people ask if we’re sisters. She makes me snort coffee through my nose at least once a week with her sly emails and take-offs of our Limerick neighbors. And she calls to say ‘How are you?’ twice as often as duty demands, and I’m always glad.

She’ll be twenty four tomorrow. Happy birthday, sis.

ENFP again. No surprises there.

Since I was small, I’ve tracked approaching milestones through the expiration dates of dairy products. When that block of cheese goes off, it’ll be my First Communion. My birthday is getting closer; the date is already stamped on that yoghurt carton. Oh God, exams start in three days, when this milk goes sour.

The Southeast Asia trip is now at the parmesan cheese stage. I fly to London on June 23rd and to Dublin a week later on a nine-dollar Ryanair flight. Then to Sardinia and back to London. But the real countdown is to July 24th, when I arrive in Bangkok with a small backpack, the stub of a one-way ticket, and the address of a hotel near the Wat Po.

My to-do list, from vaccinations to finding foster care for my bike and laptop, has kept me from sleep and web updates for days. Naturally, I’ve focused on the most urgent priorities—shoes.

It’s become an obsession. I won’t have an income for nine months, possibly longer, so what better time to buy a pair of $330 Prada mary janes? They’re beige, with white plastic soles, and I made friends with them in the window of OTP two months ago. They look like particularly dumpy nurse’s shoes, and somewhere in my addled brain I calculated that lack of glamour somehow cancelled out ludicrous expense. They would be ‘comfortable’. If I wore them every day for six months they would be incredible value on a cost-per-wear basis. I wouldn’t be a just another smelly backpacker on the Ko San Road. They could take me from the Foreign Correspondents Club in Phnom Penh to the beaches of Sikkanoukh.

Ah, spring, and the sound of women justifying. I wore my posh shoes on the ten-block walk to yoga class, and there was blood on both feet when I got there. It may have been blisters but more likely stigmata. The bloody mary janes have been banished to the cobbler’s in disgrace, and I get cranky every time I remember I have to pick them up.

Next I tried a pair of Diesel cuties. Sporty, ivory, with red Velcro straps. Comfortable enough for me to do little Gene Kelly hops on my way to the office candy jar every day. I showed them to Max, still boxfresh, and he looked like Queen Elizabeth I when Drake presented the first muddy potato. Then he tried one on as an earring.

   ‘Cool shoes,’ said Mark, eyeing them at the elevator bank on their first outing.
   ‘Thanks, do you like them?’
   ‘Um, no, not really, now you mention it.’
   ‘What are those weird little red straps? Are you into footbinding now?’ said Jason.

I didn’t care. I wore them to work every day for a week, thrilled at my lack of blisters. On the sixth day, I took them off and my sister said ‘Jesus, those stink.’
Polyester lining. Ugh.

So I gave in and bought Teva sandals in waterproof brown leather, Franciscan monk-style. I wore them in Brooklyn last weekend and didn’t feel like myself. Most of my shoes are practical enough to sprint in, but now I felt…crunchy. I tried on a pair of convertible khakis with them and stared at the camp counselor the mirror. Two weeks from your thirtieth birthday is a terrible time to experiment with frumpiness. It leads to a fresh obsession: The Perfect Sarong.