So much older then I’m younger than that now BY CAITLIN SHETTERLY

A week ago I turned 30. Finally. After the year’s long pre-show, culminating in summer weeks speeding toward the inevitable, the actual day proved almost inconsequential. My mother arrived the night before bearing a basket full of flowers from her Down East gardens, which was like Eden had come to me, full of black-eyed Susans and day lilies and sunflowers — maybe minus the mother part. The next morning as a I sipped my first cup of morning Mate at the late hour of about 7:30 a.m. we covered such birthday-related topics as why my ex-boyfriend is dating a shiksa and who is she anyway?, who the available single men were in Portland, and whether or not my new apartment — which I’m still waiting for — is really going to be done by September 1 and could drug dealers hide in the tall grass next to the front stoop? I put on Ryan Adams’s "Sylvia Plath" full blast and took my teacup into the shower with me.

Rise and Shine. My mother sat uncomfortably close to the stereo reading the New Yorker.

As I write this column, I am sitting in a twin bed upstairs at my father’s house. My father is downstairs making me breakfast and listening to NPR talk about what part of Iraq we are bombing currently and he’s intermittently screaming "fuck" not only at Dubya but also at NPR which is complicit, in his mind, with Fox News by inaccurately reporting on the war. On the one hand, breakfast is great — how many men in my life have ever made me breakfast save for the Italian boyfriend I was with in a multi-continent sort of way, flying to London for Columbus Day weekend, Milan for Christmas, Paris for a weekend (he had more credit cards than a Saudi oil prince), who could cook anything at any time of day — mostly various forms of pasta — in between smoking rolled cigarettes that sometimes had the extra zing of a sprinkling of hash?

My birthday culminated in a party I planned myself. I guess, if anything, it is a mark of maturity that one can actually plan one’s own birthday. I went to Hannaford with my mother and stocked up on $150 worth of alcohol, chips, cheese, and fruit. I cleaned. I showered and put on a small, silk, spaghetti-strapped dress and began one of the strangest parties I’ve ever been to, where almost none of my supposed close friends in Portland showed up — they were hiking or camping or at a BBQ or a wedding — and instead the house filled with about 25 random men whom I know, but barely. One I had never met over anything but fan email for my column (we all love our fans) despite the fact that both my aunt B. and my mother warned me it is not wise to invite a stranger to one’s house. As the liquor moved more and more freely, some of the male guests thought it appropriate to start touching me even more freely, like I was a very soft object on last season’s sale rack. They began to hug me to them, pull on my dress like children, and, then, in the crescendo of the evening, one hissed as he put his heavy hand around my waist, the whiskey on his breath making the small girl in me dizzy, "you know you want to fuck me."

It makes me think that men are some strange species of pygmy animal, so divorced from themselves that they don’t notice all the exceptions we women make to like them: nose hairs and ear tufts; short teeth and pug noses; skinny legs and flabby stomachs; neurotic dish washing and kale juicing — deficits they seem to be wholly unaware of as they search for the perfect skinny blonde to complete what they imagine their net worth to be. But what seems stranger, or sadder depending on how you look at it, is that despite the fact that we women have a list as we get older of things we want in our next partner — a growing, inflexible, serious list of standards we discuss with our girlfriends — when we are alone and wanting we are more and more willing to desperately throw the list out the window for the lowest common denominator of attention. Suddenly, "you know you want to fuck me" comes onto my radar as single looms like an enormous avalanche of carbs.

Single, 30, and damn sexy if I do say so myself in my silk Chinese print dress, I just hope I never get desperate enough to substitute "you know you want to fuck me" for a compliment.

Caitlin Shetterly is still researching her sexiest men in Portland list. Email her at bramhallsquare@yahoo.com