27 is not a number that brings you sesame street.

welcome! you have opened the tiny paper door to the first day of my most important fiscal advent calendar, that counting down my twenty-seventh year.

ever since high school, i have viewed this particular age with overwhelming dread and superstition, due to the tendency of my role models to keel over and feed the tree once they'd reached it. the most damaging was, of course, kurt cobain, who had made his appearance just as i was starting to really pay attention to those things, and who affected all sorts of stuff in my life, directly and indirectly. i bought my first issue of sassy because he was on the cover, and that magazine induced more formative changes in me than almost any other source i can think of. i actually still have all of my back-issues for the period between that first one and august 1994, when the magazine was taken over by the editors of ym and achieved a previously unthinkable level of suckiness. nirvana and pearl jam were the first bands in what became a long line that changed the way i listened to music, and that changed all of my social interactions, and now i'm me, and i'd like to say thanks to kurt but he died at twenty-seven. and so did jimi hendrix, and janis joplin, and jim morrison and kristen pfaff (i would still beat courtney love to death with a can of beans if i ran into her in the supermarket, but i felt okay about hole in the beginning) and i thought shannon hoon, but he was actually 28 . . . anyway, the number lodged itself in my subconscious as a literal do-or-die hurdle, and i've never been able to think of it as anything but ominous. every time one of my friends reached it, i threw a little salt over my shoulder and lit a candle while facing east at the subject's exact time of birth. no, i didn't, but i did write a long message in each of their cards asking them to please be extra careful for the next twelve months, and to not do drugs or handle live ammo if they could help it. no one's succumbed yet. i suppose it might help that none of them is a rock star in anyone's eyes but my own.

so, now it's me, and i'm no rock star, either, but it feels very strange, especially since i'm currently finalizing plans for my first-ever overseas voyage, and the person i'm traveling with is also twenty-seven. maybe we were supposed to be rock stars and somehow went astray, and now the muses will take their revenge for our negligence. no, i'm just batty. but if around the middle of december you realize you haven't heard from me in a couple of weeks, um, rock on, my bitches. rock on.