I think I feel less old than I didlast year on this particular date.

Maybe because I’m, god help me, busy.

When you are busy, you don’t have time to sit around and think about how when your mother was your own age, she had a one-year-old baby named Jessica.

When you are busy, you don’t fret over your stupid gray roots – you have places to go, so you figure out where that magic place is to part your hair, and you get out the door.

When you are busy, you have the following to-do list:

• Make onion dip
• Shower
• Get coffee
• Return library books
• Clean the litter box
• Get a tiny bit of work done on your as-of-yet not started paper
• Send back Netflix movie
• Fancy lunch with fancy friends
• Pick up more lime juice and confectioner’s sugar
• Take out the trash
• Once-over the apartment
• Figure out how to make simple syrup without burning anything or anybody – see this failure
• Figure out how to make a margarita that doesn’t taste like watery tequila
• Entertain those friends you keep trying to tell yourself you don’t have, but YOU DO and they are coming over.

So there you have it. The secret to feeling young: don’t give yourself room to feel like an old granny.

Plus, you’d have to have children to be a granny.

And you had a dream last night that you were pregnant and also drinking a large glass of wine, telling your friends how you couldn’t possibly be actually pregnant, because you had the flattest stomach ever, even though the doctor DID do a blood test, and even if you were, isn’t that just one of those old wives tales? You can still have a large glass of wine every night with a flat-stomach fetus, right?

So let’s take it one step at a time.

Margaritas first,

then we’ll think about getting old.