According to the purveyors of beauty products, expensive surgery and designer medication, 40 is the new 30. Most people, I suppose, would take this as great news and use it as an opportunity to run out and buy a shiny new shirt that they really have no business wearing.

But what about those of us who are actually 30? My birthday was Monday; I was 29 years old last week, but am I now 40 years old? I feel robbed. I want my decade back.

"Actually, I think that makes 30 the new 20," my friend, Beth, told me.

That's no good, either. If 30 is the new 20, it means my auto insurance rates would skyrocket, and I wouldn't legally be allowed to drink beer. I'm definitely not doing that -- I would prefer 30 be the new 70 than miss out on beer.

And where is this one-age-is-the-new-other-age thing going to stop? Is 20 the new 10? If so, my behavior in college was shocking. What the heck were my parents thinking, allowing a 10-year-old boy to live on his own in another city?

I'll admit that I have spent a little time thinking about aging this week. Every year on my birthday, I find myself listening to salsa music and lamenting the fact that I am still not president of Cuba. We all need to have goals in life.

Sure, the guy who's got the job at the moment still seems to be hanging on, but have I really done anything to prepare? I don't even know Spanish. Surely the CIA offers a little booklet on how to set up a proxy government, but I haven't even written to them to ask. And I'm hardly going to be able to buy influence on my present salary. If treinta really is the new veinte, I've still got time, but I'm not getting any younger.

For the most part, though, I find I'm not really all that bothered by the fact that I am now 30. In fact, I find myself surprisingly less apprehensive about this birthday than in years past. Now that I am a bit older, I can comfortably say that I do not belong in those clothing stores in the mall that resemble dance clubs.

Through my 20s, I found myself struggling to decide where I should buy my clothes. I felt I was too young for sweater vests and khakis, but at stores targeting a younger crowd I found myself yelling at the girls who worked there: "For the love of Pete, that skirt is short -- wrap a blanket around your waist or something! What is wrong with you, young lady? Does your mother know you dress this way?"

Now, at age 30, I can embrace my age, comfortably avoid the discotheque haberdasheries and do what every other 30-year-old man does: wear whatever my wife tells me to.

My wife is a big reason I'm not particularly upset about getting a year older. Something about her takes away all the panic that a birthday can produce. I was able to dupe her into marrying me (she thinks I'm the bastard son of Prince Charles), and if nothing else ever happens in my life, I know that I still get to wake up to her each morning.

Something about that calms me and helps me to see a wider picture in life. Somewhat poetically, my new 20s mirror my old 20s -- I am planning on moving to Britain to attend university, just as I was 10 years ago. The cynical spin on such a plan goes something like this: "I have spent an entire decade spinning my wheels and now I have to start all over again; I am behind in the great unspoken race of life and I will never catch up. Oh, sweet angels in heaven, I've wasted my life and now I'm 30 and I need one of those operations that will make my hands look younger. I have old hands! My hand-model days are gone before they even came to fruition! Woe is me! Soon they will be pushing me around the old folks' home and laughing at me."

I don't feel any of that. I am able to see beyond the immediacy of what I don't have to what I can achieve. But I don't feel that I am the new 20, either. I am my age and that's alright by me. There's not a race.

Besides, Castro didn't take over Cuba until he was 32.

Chris Cope is married, with no children. His column appears every other Tuesday.