30 Things to Do Before You Turn 30 — The Bold Italic

I’ll tell this embarrassing tale only once, so keep reading. I was 24 when my parents drove me out to San Francisco from Iowa — over the plains, the desert, and then the Bay Bridge. It was the Oregon Trail, with a Dodge Caravan in lieu of the covered wagon. Zooming past the Tenderloin junkies, mom and dad dumped me and a single mattress off at my sister’s rent-controlled loft on Nob Hill. Rent was $950 in 2007. I crashed there for a couple weeks before heading off to a rental room in a Mission Victorian, the Nob Hill loft turning into a $2,500-a-month corporate condo.

Welcome to SF, young lady! The city’s Summer of Love lore and endless offerings for the young beckoned, but I wasn’t here for the weed and parties. I had a reporting internship at SF Weekly — then a job at SF Weekly — writing cover stories that would be plunked down in newsstands all over the city. I had to get serious fast.

There were a few benders and a lot of flamenco classes, but I mostly spent my 20s in the city not so much being young, as covering the young: anonymous protesters, Occupiers, transgender kids, gang members. When I asked guys for their numbers at Zeitgeist, it was to score interviews for a story on bike messengers. The only time I chugged Red Bull was to pull a feverish all-nighter before a 9 a.m. deadline. Then there was my all-time lame-o moment when I jumped out of a car at a stoplight, ditching my 20-something coworkers on their way to lunch by saying, “I can’t do this! I gotta make phone calls!”

Even in my personal life, I skipped over the obligatory string of OkCupid dates to move in with a boyfriend nearly two decades my senior. He was one of those youthful 40-somethings who fit right into this city’s Peter Pan playland — more Radiohead and Rupa & the April Fishes than mortgages and babies. He peppered me with the maddening advice to “enjoy being young,” yet, inevitably, my San Francisco customs skewed older: the New Yorker with Peet’s on Saturday mornings. DVD rentals at Lost Weekend on Saturday night. Wine parties with 50-somethings.

In some respects, I fit right in with San Francisco. These days, the city is less about lost, strung-out youth than “30 Under 30” lists and 25-year-old start-up CEOs. In certain circles, it seems that a lady doesn’t need a baby by 30, but she sure as hell better have 3,000 Twitter followers and a homepage by that age.

As I approached the big 3–0 in January, though, I got nervous. I have few regrets, but I’m almost neurotically obsessed with keeping it that way. Maybe I’d missed out on something! Perhaps there were some experiences that I simply wasn’t going to be able to get away with once my age started with a “3”! I hadn’t gotten anywhere close to landing on a 30-under-30 list, but I did create my own: the “Before-30 Bucket List.” I get the irony, that this list turns being young and carefree into a serious thing, but, c’mon, how else do things get done? Prepare the Red Bull.