"Ideas are like beards, men do not have them until they grow up." -Voltaire

I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up. I don’t even know if I want to grow up. Growing up implies you have learned from mistakes, taken chances and jumped off the deep end into a life of paying taxes.

I believe it was the great Bob Dylan who told me, "May you grow up to be righteous, may you grow up to be true. May you always know the truth and see the lights surrounding you. May you always be courageous, stand upright and be strong. May you stay forever young.”

I happen to like the small dependence upon my parents with which I still cling to. I like to think it makes them feel closer to me; that we still have that bond. Ha. I’m sure they are counting down the days until I graduate.

In many ways I don’t want this life of mediocre responsibility to end. I am in charge of my few bills, my dogs, my terribly paid jobs, my grades and myself. Come December I’ll need a 401K and a cheap place to live. Right now I fret about what I’m going to do on Saturday night. In a few months I have a feeling I’ll be going into work on weekends.

I see so many homeless people here, who have made a career of it. I wonder what their stories are, how they ended up this way. I wonder how many of them had a tragedy, or if it was just laziness. I wonder if they have a disability, or if their only friend is Bad Luck. And today, I wondered how many of them just couldn’t take the plunge into the Real World and somehow, through their avoidance of responsibility were thrust into the harshest world of all. This makes me positive about the fact that the Real World eventually finds everyone, whether they are prepared for it or not.

My summer class met for it’s mandatory weekly meeting yesterday. We went to the New York Public Library to listen to an author speak. She writes for the New York Times and has just published a book. As an aspiring writer, I was extremely excited to hear her.

She was young. Mid-twenties. Mousy. Wearing the author’s typical black drab. She wore round glasses in thin frames which she constantly took off and placed the ear piece of in her mouth, pensively, before quickly putting them on top of her head and then immediately, deciding she desperately needed them, would put them back on her face. This was an excruciating process that went on for an hour and a half.

I was let down for some reason to see the unoriginality of it all; the black, the glasses, the waif-like appearance. And then she spoke and I began to think I was heading into the wrong career.

Like the authors portrayed in movies, she was arrogant and had funny ways of pronouncing the strangest words; almost as if she did it on purpose. People in the audience would nod in agreement and chime in as she made what they believed were ‘smart’ comments on life and the world in general. I couldn’t stand it. She was everything I did not want to be in an author. She was everything I did not want to be in a speaker. I did not want to become her. She made me scared of the Real World.

Hopefully, our parents have deemed it a mission to brace us for the inevitableness of life; if only for the fact they will grow sick of us when we are thirty living in their basement, never venturing outside because the sunlight hurts our eyes. But, I like to think on top of that is my parents’ desire for me to do better; to make something of myself which they can brag about in line at Walmart to my retired sixth grade teacher, Mrs. Schwitzer. Yes, the one who always spoke with her eyes closed and wore tragic knitted sweaters with teddy bears and snowmen.

When I begin to think about my parents’ dreams for me, I immediately see them wanting me to have a job. A real job. Not the kind where I sit at home and write all day. I know they also picture a wedding. This is almost scarier than getting a real job where I don’t just sit at home and write all day.

Marriage.
Marry.
Wed.

I used to be that girl who talked to her girlfriends about her dress and what colors she wanted and how she was going to do her hair. Yes, I was that girl. Sometime around high school I came around. It’s not that I don’t want to get married. It’s not that I’m not a romantic. I think it’s just that I’m not as hopeful anymore. I think as our innocence goes, so does our endless amount of hope that everything will turn out alright and that your life will end like the fairytales your mother plopped in the VCR to distract you so she could have and hour and thirty minutes to herself.

I am a firm believer that Disney did distort and perhaps ruin my perception of men. They are not valiant, they are not rugged and handsome at all times and they are definitely not all good dressers and princes. I remember also being disappointed that carpets couldn’t fly me across town and that no one could really talk with animals. But that’s another blog post all together.

My good buddy (I use the term loosely, as we have yet to meet), author Sloane Crosley, makes a good point in her book, “I Was Told There’d be Cake.”

“I have never pictured my own wedding. I do want to get married. It’s a nice idea. Though I think husbands are like tattoos-you should wait until you come across something you want on your body for the rest of your life instead of just wandering into a tattoo parlor on some idle Sunday and saying, ‘I feel like I should have one of these suckers by now. I’ll take a thorny rose and a “MOM” anchor, please. No, not that one-the big one.’”

I have friends who have taken the plunge, and God bless them, they are the brave ones. I envy them. I gave all my love to Rocky and Rolley to have any left for a real man.




Loves of my life.