A List of Things To Do

I want to practice being an old lady now so it's easier later. Master the quilting, the baking, the cat snuggling, the gardening while I'm young, so I can spend my latter years learning to embrace my age and not mourn the loss of my youth.

I want my desk to face a wall. How can you get any work done if you sit behind the desk, jammed in tight, facing the door and everyone who passes by it. This is one of the things I find most pointless about American office design. No wonder we're so stressed.

I want to take the medications I'm supposed to take correctly. I don't want to be calling the pharmacy in panic in the afternoon because I can't stay awake and I forgot to call in the morning. I don't want to have trek to Planned Parenthoods in unfamiliar cities because I left my Nuva ring in the refrigerator at my old house.

I want to live in India. And then I want to move home.

I want to write. And read and run and quilt and grow and sing and dance and move somewhere at least once for a boy or a girl or a friend or some less than logical reason. I want to host parties that instigate marriage proposals. I want to have a bulletproof resume and a bathtub. I want to write letters and e-mails and letters of recommendation. I want to have time to turn my experiences into stories that I can tell my kids. I want to embrace my sentimental foolishness and get a roll of quarters for the laundromat.

But for today, I'll settle for publishing a silly blogpost about things that have been on my mind.

Ch-ch-ch-changes

I'm turning 22 in 8 days and I'm sort of freaking out about it. I realized close to the end of the summer that there would be some ch-ch-ch-changes going on this year, but I didn't fully realize the consequences of making them. Being a young adult is really scary right now. I'm starting to finally feel scared. I'm not scared of the real world. I'm not scared to be poor. But I am scared to get stuck in a situation because I got lazy.

So I've been trying to get unstuck. I went back to school. I'm living with people now, and it's been great. I ended a pretty serious relationship, was on my own for a few months, then let myself get involved with someone else because it's a crazy life and it's a lot more pleasant to go through the craziness with someone else. I'm trying to work with a luthier for winter term. I don't want to let my dream of doing instrument repair fall by the wayside because I never gave myself time to try it.

But still, I'm turning 22 in 8 days. I guess I expected that I'd be further along in my life right now. I thought I'd be closer to being done with college. I thought I'd know what I wanted to be when I grew up. And I thought that if for some reason I hadn't done either of these things it would be because I had a beautiful small child to raise and support. Obviously, it's a good thing that I don't have a beautiful small child to support, but it's frustrating to me that the numbers of my age make me look like an adult, yet I'm obviously not one. I feel like I've accomplished so little in the grand scheme of things. I mean, sure I've made a ton of good stories, but I'd hope that I'd have more than just funny things to tell my future grandchildren by now.

I know I'm just facing the disillusionment everyone faces when they realize that they actually can't be an astronaut/ballerina when they grow up. But it's less of a "I can't" than a "Why the hell haven't I done this already?" So from now on I'm aiming for fewer WTH moments. I'm going to take classes because I need them to graduate, but also because I want to take them before I graduate. I'm going to ask for things because I want them, and not just because they are things I know I can easily get. Right now I'm looking back on 21 and thinking that I should have done less drinking and more planning. I know it's really silly, but I'm not ready to turn 22 because I don't feel like I've accomplished enough to warrant what seems like such an advanced age. Hopefully by the time I'm getting ready to turn 23, I'll be more mentally prepared for it.