A few days before I moved into the apartment above Tom and Sylvia, I received a birthday card that said “___ is the new 29!” You could write in whatever age the person was turning, but since I was turning 29, my friend thought it would be funny to leave it bank. I wasn’t sad to be 29, but the wild-card nothingness of “___” made me apprehensive.

I’d been living with my boyfriend up until his mother got him a job in DC with their senator. Max was ecstatic at the prospect of running through the corridors of the Capitol after a suntanned Silver Fox. I told him he was at least seven years too old to be lugging around armfuls of dot-matrix printouts. He said that if he got to lug them onto Air Force One, it all will have been worth it. He also questioned why I didn’t want to go with him. He wasn’t hurt that I didn’t love him enough to tag along. He simply didn’t get it since “you don’t really have a career.”