On occasion, I feel incredibly isolated.

It's nights where everything is too quiet, but you're not sleepy yet. Times where you run out of things on the internet to check out, when your thoughts start to creep up on you. Sometimes on nights like this, I realize just how few people I really talk to lately, despite the fact that they are my friends. Then I think about how, if this is growing up, growing apart, then I don't really want to do it.

Sometimes on nights like this, I like to try and picture our futures. Most of the time I can't. I can't see myself having a steady job, and a house and a family. Can't see myself in the normal roles of adulthood. And it throws me off sometimes. Because if everyone ends up where they aim to go, my friends would be running programming firms, or working in bio labs and partying the nights away in fabulous gay clubs, or maybe writing books and being a literary editor. My best friends would be writing books or maybe fashion articles, and living in Spain or Paris, crafting the days away and living as a criminal profiler, and maybe I'd be working in a lab with dyed hair, discovering things about nanotechnology. Exes would be professional gamers and world renowned bowlers. And no one would have to worry about money, ever because that's what happens in cotton candy perfect fantasy worlds right?

The future is always incredibly up in the air, and what you make of it and all that rot, but what does it have in store really? Will I live near the people I love, maybe close enough to my best friends that we can have each other over for drinks when life gets to be too much? Maybe. I'd like to think that anyway. It would be wicked if we could, because I don't think I can handle the thought of a future where I'm incredibly isolated from everyone, friendships falling away from me one at a time because I didn't take the time to maintain them.

I hope I'm not the only one who feels lost when it comes to the future. ...Read more...

On the Nature of Adulthood and Replacing Water Filters

Yesterday, as I drove around town with a friend, letting summer slip through my fingers in a combination of idle chatter and ineffectiveness I eventually came upon the realization that we were  adults now. As inane as that sounds, to me it was significant-- we had clawed our way through mandatory education and had finished our first year of college. As much as all of our middle and high school teachers always lectured that we would have to shape up in college and actually study, actually try, and stop waiting till the last minute to finish our assignments by the skin of our teeth, I didn't feel like anything had actually changed.

Maybe it was the high school I went to, but all that really happened over the years was that I refined my procrastination technique. And as much as I am jealous of others' ability to actually manage their time and be effective (perhaps even super effective?), I never felt more alive as when I had stayed up for three days straight to cram for my Organic Chemistry exam and finish 3 final papers.  It was a badge of pride to get sleep in my high school, but more than that, it was a badge of pride to be able to crank out a paper for Brit Lit in 4 hours, or to finish 12 lab reports for the Chemistry lab book check that was due the next day. I take pride in the ability to pump out a paper or cram the night before, but on some level, as I look at the B on my transcript, I know I could have done better if I didn't procrastinate.

So what really changes in the course of being an adult? What makes 18 such a significant age that we're considered adults by technicality? I don't really feel like an adult. And I know that a lot of people older than me wouldn't consider 18 as really being an adult either.

According to some it's the existence of a monthly bill. I don't think it's that cut and dry. Sometimes I realize that I'm growing up when I replace the water filter instead of letting someone else do it. Taking simple little responsibilities instead of waiting for someone else to do it for you. But maybe I'm mistaking adulthood for maturity... Then again are they really mutually exclusive? ...Read more...