#48 Grow Up!
When I wake up in the morning, after I brush my teeth and wash my face, I will occasionally look at my face in the mirror. And every time I remember to do this, which isn’t often, I tend to notice direct signs of the aging process. Today was one of those days. And what’s worse is the fact that when I wake up on most Saturdays, after playing basketball for a few hours the day before, my body now feels sore, and I think that if I were to stretch before playing, I’d probably be able to avoid these sores and aches. But stretching is for old people! My grandparents are supposed to stretch in order to keep their aging bodies limber. I’m supposed to be young forever, and young people don’t need to stretch. Young people also don’t feel the side effects from smoking cigarettes, but lately, I’ve begun to notice a few of them, and so I find myself saying to myself, at an increasing rate, “Man, I gotta quit smoking, I’m getting too old for this shit!”
But let’s leave the physical body and its aging process aside for a bit. Let’s deal with my personal life. How about my career trajectory? Let’s see…what are my qualifications? I’m twenty-five years old and everything that I do in my life is part time. I work thirty hours a week to earn enough money for rent, bills, and booze. I play guitar in a surf rock cover band that practices at most twice a week, and plays out a few times a month. I write a weekly column, per diem, on my own time, every Sunday. I have no girlfriend, I have no real responsibilities, and I wake up more often than not happy as a clam, and proud of myself for creating a niche in the world that I can actually enjoy.
But I said more often than not. What about those ‘not days,’ what about those other days? You know the days I’m talking about, the awful ones – the ones where I wake up and my mind blares a soundtrack full of worry and self-doubt. “You’re too old to have no health insurance, no nest egg, and no great source of income. You should be out meeting the right girl, all of your friends are getting married, and you don’t want to be that loner single dude at all of their weddings. Why don’t you have a career? I thought that when we graduated from college with two majors and a pretty decent GPA that we were going to do something with those assets, after a year off from academia, working in the service industry? Guess what, soldier, it’s 2008 and as of this April, you’ll have now taken four years off from academia, and you don’t have much to show for it.”
And the worst part about your conscience is that it doesn’t care how much it pisses you off, it won’t repent or relent, and leave you alone; even though I have several counter arguments and justifications that could win over a jury of my peers! I would tell this imaginary jury, “But that’s totally inaccurate and paranoid—you don’t need to accomplish what your friends have accomplished for themselves – they have different passions and ambitions than you do!” But as I said, my conscience doesn’t really care about justifications and sweet nothing-rationalizations. So on days like today, I feel lousy, because I have suddenly stumbled upon yet another new, irrational fear of mine, and this embarrasses me, since I prematurely claimed to have absolved myself from said fears about two weeks ago. So here I go again; my newest irrational fear is the fear that I haven’t proven my worth to my peers yet. But I counter that fear with the thought, “what difference does it make if my peers think I’m wasting my time or not?” What kind of moron would juxtapose himself with his peers and then rate and rank the quality of his life based on the results? I’ll tell you who, it’s the same kind of moron who assigns himself the job of writing a weekly column, for no pay. But my juxtaposition woes bother me the most because they are akin to embracing the socially induced peer pressure that is generated in American High Schools – the exact sort of pressure that I have strived to stray from since I graduated in 1999. I should not compare and contrast myself with my peers, if I want to be truly happy, because happiness is unique, and not a commodity.
So I’ve become a twenty something bachelor. I wake up on each of my three days off per week whenever I feel like it, and do whatever I feel like. Unfortunately, I’ve never been good at slacking, I’m a pretty motivated person, so even on my days off, I wake up before most construction crews do, I make lists, and plans, and I create a busy schedule, even if the schedule simply involves meeting friends for food and drinks. And I’m old enough to realize that I cannot change this aspect of me, and it’s ironic because this sort of anal organizational preoccupation of mine is exactly what makes me a good restaurant manager, which is the very occupation I strive to someday part ways with.
So I’m stuck in a circular holding pattern wherein my most valuable assets to the real world seem only to land me on a career path that I do not want to follow, and yet I could be fairly successful at. Luckily, I meet a lot of people who are twenty to thirty years older than I am, here in Portland, and we often hang out, and most of these people don’t have a career, but they do seem to have a nice living situation and some cash to spare. So there is hope. But I must ask the question; how did they do it? They don’t have law degrees or MBA’s, yet they toss twenties at bartenders like I toss the delicious tiny shake-remnants of a potato chip bag into my mouth when I’m stoned. Mmm Potato chips.
But the bachelor life isn’t as sweet as some of my married friends might like to think it is. I mean, sure, I can drink and smoke pot whenever I feel like it, and I can roll over as much as I want in bed, and no one ever steals all the covers. But on the flip side, I’m alone a lot, I don’t have a supportive friend and confidante who has pledged to help me if I help her for the rest of my days here on Earth, and as I age, the hangovers get worse, and the highs from drinking aren’t nearly as mind blowing or fun as they were when I was still experimenting with substance abuse. Getting wasted is getting lame.
I mean, when you analyze my life; it’s pretty comical. How do I sum up twenty-five years of ‘un-professionalism?’ Let’s see, well, if you call my cell phone and I don’t pick up, you’ll hear the sound of a human (me!) impersonating a chicken squawking, and if you come over for dinner, chances are that I’m “making take-out” or homemade spaghetti and sauce from a can (which is basically adult Spaghetti-O’s.). Since I don’t have an anniversary to celebrate, I typically celebrate “new disposable contact day” on the first and fifteenth of each month (which is also pay check day!). And when I get sick, instead of having someone to take care of me and tell me how to get healthy again, I tend to buy junk food and eat French bread pizza in bed while watching stupid comedies on TV.
So I wake up on my three days off and I do whatever I feel like…but what do I feel like? And this is where my mind has been stuck for over a year now. I finally have moved to a city I like, I have established an amazing group of eclectic and special friends who I truly care about, and yet I wake up some of the time feeling like a waste of space. Why do I have a conscience, and an ego, which force me to think about my existence? Why is it not enough for me to wake up, feel hungry, find food, feel horny, find a female and have sex, and repeat this until my body grows old and my heart fails, or some vicious predator catches me because it’s hungry? I wonder if I’m alone here, could it be that nostalgia for Neanderthals has become passé? Even with our fancy clothes on, we’re still animals!
And to get back to the original paragraph of this column – physically aging does not help me to get over the fact that on paper, I don’t have enough accolades to support my lofty ego. One of my oldest and closest friends was born exactly eight days after me, and we’ve had an ongoing joke about how I get to do everything before he does, ever since I first turned sixteen, and got my driver’s license one week before he did. This joke was yet again funny when I could buy tobacco before he could. And it was even funnier when I was the first to legally buy booze, and I even got a chuckle this past summer when I was able to rent a car a week before he could. But now the tides have turned. I realized the other day that when I was young (I can’t believe I just said ‘when I was young’) it was cool to be eight days older than my friend. But now I get to be the first to have a weird growth checked out by a doctor, all the while praying that I don’t have cancer. And I’ll get to be the first to sign up for regular prostate exams. And I’ll probably be the first to need Viagra to please my estranged wife when I’m in my seventies.
Now I know that I’m being irrational, and I know that aging is an inevitable part of life, and it’s a process that should be enjoyed, but c’mon, when I said that I had rid myself of irrational fears, did you really believe me? You think I actually walk by a well and see a well, instead of a horrible death trap which I could accidentally fall into and starve to death in, all the while losing my voice from trying to yell for help, even though I’m miles away from anyone who could hear me? And you think that the next time I get on an airplane, I won’t be secretly convinced that some idiot on an island is going to neglect to enter the numeric code into the computer that is required every 108 minutes in order to protect my fight path from a freaky electromagnetic storm that will strand me on said island for the rest of my days? (You only get this joke if you watch ABC’s “Lost”.)
No, it’s in my nature to think too much, and then react to those thoughts ‘too much’ and then to react to the reaction to my thoughts, and then to…oh, you get the picture, don’t you? So what am I saying here, where is my tidy, succinct conclusion, complete with a clever pun and an innuendo that brings the reader’s mind back to the original point? Why did I just spend several hours of my life writing and editing a transcript of my inner-monologue and all of the trivialities that have been bothering me lately? Is it because I’m narcissistic and need attention from my readers? Or is it because I think that this sort of personal therapy helps others to feel better about being in a similar condition? Maybe it’s a combination, or maybe it’s none of the above, I just know that it’s what I do every Sunday, and this is the forty-eighth Sunday that I’ve done it, and now it’s routine, and I love routine, so I guess I’m stuck in another circular holding pattern. And I don’t like holding patterns. “Man, I gotta’ quit smoking, I’m getting too old for this shit.”
