I sit in Starbucks on a rainy Saturday afternoon, typing on an apple wireless keyboard, with my phone hidden by my side. I am.... the most pretentious girl you know.

Took three different buses with some teenage girls today; got to listen to more renditions of the word like than I can remember hearing in quite some time.

I'm getting old.

Well, I've been getting old my whole life; you'd think I'd be used to it by now. Not so much.

Getting old iis planning for the future. Realizing tht you have to take into account things like your mortality, your income level, your fertility... scary and kinda cool at the same time.

It's nice to hear someone echo reasons why you're with them.

Tee hee - just got someone asking me questions about my keyboard. Guess the phone wasn't as hidden as I thought.

Only really challenging thing abot this is that blogger doesn't have a nice smartphone/blackberry friendly version o fthe interface, so a lot of what i'm writing is hidden - so I can't go back and fix mistakes too easily. I'm malso very spoiled by my work blackberry's automatic rendition of certain shortcut s- so I'm not automatically capitalizing the letter I when it appears . I know someone is going to eventually read this and say something.

I'm always surprised when people pick up on facets of my character that i never think are particularly obvious - the example i usually go back to is when a friend told someone I never use bookmarks. Recently, I had another one of those moments: one of my colleagues was saying that he figurd my luggage would be flaming neon pink -- because I'm unusual and he could see me with someone that wasn't conventional like that. My boss, by contrast, looked at him and said, "you don't know Jen, do you know"?

I just thought it was cool that a: this colleague had picked up on the fct that I'm unconventional, and b: my boss had also picked up on that, but knew that I wasn't a girly girl, and likely wouldn't be found with hot pink.

It's similar to when people look at my ring and say, "that's very you" -- and part of what made that last dress-shopping excursion so doubly frustrating.

I'm trying to take advantage of the fact that I'm getting older, but also have a bit more free time and a bit more money than I did when I was younger -- so now I'm taking music lessons once more, and I'm giving some extra thought to going back to school. As I've said to my mom and to a coworker friend of mine -- I keep saying I want to do this I want to learn that, but never getting around to doing it. Well, sure, learning new things is scary and hard, and sure, it can be tougher when you're older -- but you only get one life to live, so why not go for it? why kep putting things off?

Dear Abby has some advice for people who want to go back to school when they're older but are intimidated by the fact tht they'll be surrounded by younger people, or will be XX old when they graduate -- as she says, you'll be XX years old when that amount of time passes anyhow, so why not use the time learning? Of coures, she says it much more elegantly than I just did, but the basics are there.

So sure, there are 7 year olds who are better than I am on the instrument, but guess what - there's always going to be someone better than me. Can't let that stop me from trying and having fun with it.