You can't go home again

Nothing like a cold to make you feel like you've been run over by a truck. Repeatedly. I've put in a day and a half at the office this week, and tomorrow I'm off to drive down to NJ. Tomorrow, G-pa turns 86, and Saturday, a good friend from high school is getting married.

She's not the first friend my age to get married, but for some reason, this feels more like the beginning of a new chapter in my life than previous marriages. There've been a lot of articles written about my generation and how we're taking our sweet time growing up (combination of bad job market and too much pressure in high school and college are the usual reasons given) and creating a new life-stage, between adolescence and adult-hood. I'm entirely too lazy to look up any of these articles, but I've read several over the last 3 years--had to do something while I was looking for jobs and living in my mom's basement (wait a minute…that's what all those articles were about...)--and I'm also too lazy to look up and see what they were proposing to call this new life stage. The first time I read one, it said "tweens," meaning between teenager and adult, but that’s since been co-opted by the pre-teen set.

So anyway. I don't really feel like an adult yet. I have a steady, 9-5 job (in my desired career path, no less). I pay rent and bills. But I still feel like I'm playing at being a grown-up. My friends have jobs, or they’re grad students, or off in Japan teaching English. Yet a lot of them feel similarly—that we’re just play-acting, like pre-schoolers playing “house” or “school.”

And now I've got this good friend from my past who is getting married. Sure, she's still a grad student, so if not for the impending ceremonies, she'd still be in this quasi-state with the rest of us. But she's going off into this new stage of life and that's absolutely crazy to me. Even if I walked out of my apartment tomorrow and bumped into the person who I want to spend the rest of my life with...I'm not there yet.

The other, really jarring thing about this is that it made me realize something that actually happened months, if not a couple of years ago. I'm still good friends with several of my friends from high school, and there are more who I don't talk to as often, but I am still friendly with. And they are "my friends from home." But one by one, we've moved on. The friend who is getting married is still based where we grew up, but that's not going to last long. I'm not saying that we're suddenly going to stop talking to one another, or going to visit one another, or fall completely out of touch. But it did make me realize that not only is that "chapter of my life" over, but the one after that is over, too. (I'm going to blame the cliché on being fever-addled most of the week.)

Obligatory End of the Year Post

Bear with me, this will hopefully be my last navel-gazing post for a while. Something in the air in December makes me really, really introspective.

Remember when you were a kid, and you always listened to grown-ups complaining about time going soooo fast and not knowing what they were talking about? And then all of a sudden you blinked and you were a grown-up?

Well, all of a sudden, I blinked, and I've been out of college and time just keeps going faster and faster and I want to scream stop! I need to enjoy this! But time doesn't listen, because time is a motherfucker.

December of 2004. I graduated college. (Tip for those of you still in college: Don't graduate a semester early.) I had only just met Jon a couple of months previous, and I was still dating him. I went home to NJ. I was antisocial over "winter break" and played a lot of Super Mario World. I had a definite feeling of "Now what?" And in January, I started looking for jobs, starting with a "part-time" job at B&N. (I was full-time inside of 3 weeks. Wheee.)

December of 2005. I was the head cashier at B&N. I spent my time working, sleeping, or drinking at O'Malley's. I think I was depressed. I was disheartened by my inability to find a real job, but still unwilling to look outside of publishing. I got a wretched cold on Christmas Eve. I got dumped and my brand new boots broke all in the same night. I felt trapped. I hated my job. It was bad.

December of 2006. I was an editorial assistant at Prentice Hall. The job was too easy, and I missed Boston. I'd been applying to jobs in Boston unsuccessfully. I'd been so thrilled to get the job, but I was beyond ready to move on, even though I had only been in the job for 10 months. (See: me going on an interview in January, and telling my boss I was doing so. But without that, we wouldn't have any of the stuff in December of 2007) Living at home was driving me insane)

December of 2007. I'm an assistant editor now, all because I did something kinda stupid and really ballsy. Wow. (For the record, the interview was a disaster.) I moved back to Boston, I've got an awesome group of friends here, I was brave and braved the Midwest. For the first time, life is really looking up in December. Even though the EA job > B&N, and B&N > unemployment, I was so...stuck that December sucked. But I had an awesome year, and I'm looking forward to 2008. (I had to double check this earlier. The thing about working in textbook publishing is that you lose track of what year it is, because our copyright years are so skewed from the calendar year.)

I hope your New Year's Eve is everything you want it to be, and that 2008 is an awesome year for everyone.

"and it goes fast...you think of the past..."

Somewhere between Boston and Northvale, something changes. I think it's when I'm crossing the Tappan-Zee Bridge and heading into Rockland County that something in my head reverts and I become some I used to be. It's not just my accent that code shifts, but the way I think changes.

I went to the Palisades mall on Saturday to finish off last minute Christmas shopping. Considering I worked there during Christmas 2 years ago, you'd think I'd know better. I parked down in the Home Depot lot (and it was just like when I worked at B&N) and I started walking up the hill to get to mall proper. And I think, "Man, this is far. I can't believe I used to walk this all the time!" and then I thought, "I can't believe I just thought that, this isn't far at all." I walk farther than that all the time in Boston--I walk at least that far just to get to the T stop. But something flips a switch in my brain and all of a sudden 200 feet is far.

I went out with old friends while I was home, too, and the same thing happened. I'm not that person anymore, but I was when I was with them. How can change be so impermanent? When I read old journal entries, I don't recognize that person anymore. So how can I become that person so easily?

I'm back in Boston, now, so my Jersey accent is mellowing again. You are probably all lucky you didn't hear it while I was home.