a $22 cocktail and a Domino's pepperoni pizza

I thought writing about my birthday might be a tad self-indulgent — and then I logged onto Instagram to an onslaught of “Spotify Wrapped” posts. Self-indulgence reigns, so hand me the mic. This is an essay that’s only a little bit about food.

Age is a collection of numbers. It’s one wrinkle over my left eyebrow and hundreds of dollars spent waging war against it. It’s six hours of sleep when I used to need eight, 93,000 miles on the car I swear I bought yesterday and the 20 years I’ve owned my favorite pair of gym shorts.

It’s the $22 cocktail I ordered on my birthday and the two slices of Domino’s pepperoni pizza I ate at my kitchen counter later that night.

On Wednesday, I turned 36, and something about that number is throwing me off. It feels like I was barely 35, and then I mistakenly told someone the other day that I was turning 37. But here I am, in the middle of those two numbers — and somehow still in the middle of growing up.

At 36, I wonder if I’ll end up having a baby someday. I wonder if I’m ready to make a career change. I wonder where I’ll be living when I’m 40. I have no answers to all these questions I’d always subconsciously believed would be resolved by now — and I don’t want to know the answers yet, either.

Eighteen was half my life ago. And though I’ve never been someone to set arbitrary benchmarks — I never assumed I’d be married by a certain age, or have a kid by a certain age, or buy a house by a certain age — I have to think 18-year-old me would’ve imagined 36-year-old me would be, well, a lot less like her 18-year-old self. Maybe I’ve got that condition where there’s a gap between how old I feel and how old I am — or maybe growing up is just realizing there’s no such thing as growing up.

Many of my friends face more stresses than I do: sick kids, healthy kids, the stress of buying a home in this economy, ailing parents, rambunctious dogs. I have a great interest rate and a supportive husband and a cat who I think might’ve been bred in a lab to be perfect. So maybe I thought growing up would be harder. Maybe I’ve chosen an easy path. Maybe Botox is affecting my cognition. I can say for certain that marrying someone six years younger than I am can sometimes feel like a prolonged trip to Never Land.

But then, of course, there’s the wrinkle and the check-engine light and the massive rip in the side of those lime-green shorts, which are barely fit to be pajamas these days. Age is an equation I can’t quite solve.

Maybe that’s why I had no interest in celebrating this birthday. I went to the office, sat in some meetings, dragged my husband to get a passport photo taken. I waffled on plans, claiming I didn’t know what I wanted to eat or how tired I’d be at the end of the day. And then, out of nowhere, I announced a plan: I wanted to try a new cocktail bar, and then I wanted to go home and order Domino’s.

And that, then, is 36: old enough to want what you want. Old enough to order a cocktail that costs more than your share of dinner and a pizza that tastes the same as it did in 1995. Old enough to have eaten a thousand better pizzas and still want that one. Old enough to begin to begin to begin to stop trying so hard.