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Well, I knew it would happen. It was probably inevitable, after getting married and going to grad school. Adulthood has caught me by the back of the neck and shaken. Suddenly I find myself getting up early to do homework instead of staying up late. Going out walking during lunch instead of reading trash novels and eating giant Au Bon Pain cinnamon rolls (mmm, delicious calorific icing). Because getting plump is only cute while you still don't have gray hair, and I can't afford to buy new pants, so no more cinnamon rolls for me.
But getting up at 5AM - I haven't done that since I was a baker. And when you're a baker it's different. You're awake, but it's all autopilot. You throw on some techno or punk music, drink coffee from a sippy cup, and throw flour and yeast into the giant mixer that whirs like a weird droning bass track on your CD, which you play over and over because changing it with flour crusted fingers ruined the last two CDs.
Responsibility is chasing me down. Soon I'll be doing yoga in the mornings again or something awful. I've already ended up at the gym at 6AM a few times - just me and the moms on their way to the kind of job where you wear very low key yet tasteful clothes.
And this is definitely the future I've chosen for myself. I've asked for this, chased it down and all that. Paid good money and given up vampire-novel reading time to read books on how to be the kind of person who wakes up at 6AM to go to the gym, bake muffins, and draw up plans for book-reading events.
I'm happy about that. But I just can't make the voice in the back of my head shut up. The voice that comes from reading too many issues of World Policy Journal and Punk Planet one year in Seattle, the year right after the World Trade Organization riots. There were political magazines everywhere, and I dated an older french guy who was a member of the International Workers of the World, and I thought I'd be a hippy-punk-goth artist who broke all these boundaries and always wore green lipstick and smoked exotic cigarettes and hung out in coffeeshops in tall black boots talking about the Zeitgeist with immigrant boys.
And it was fun. It was cool. It was hip. But all those people were awfully lonely, somehow. It seems like if you want to feel warm and fuzzy inside, you have to live a warm, fuzzy life. And that means working out and going on lunch dates and doing grownup things. It means cleaning the toilet and scrubbing the kitchen floor and taking out the trash and paying attention to the details. Because glamourous decay isn't very glamourous when it descends into unscrubbed dishes and a weird smell under the sink and boys who never wash their hair because that would rinse out all the elmers glue they use to keep it sticking up, and poets who write endless moody sad verse and whose clothes always smell like stale drugs.
My apartment smells like curry, and all my furniture matches. My husband is sitting on the couch. I don't live with crazy lesbians anymore. I don't walk around in full punk regalia and hippy jeans, or do any of those things. But I still write moody poetry and hang out in coffee shops and put things off that one extra day to read the latest novel by Laurell Hamilton or Kim Harrison or Charlaine Harris. (Or Tamora Pierce or...)
So I dunno know. I try to tell myself that I can be cool, and still grow up. But there's not a lot of models for that floating around, and sometimes I wonder how it can be done. I've met lots of cool fifty year olds, sixty year olds. But it seems like thirty and forty are decades that are more about getting things done, in between periods of cool. I suppose that's good too. I'll have to see. It still makes me edgy though.
But getting up at 5AM - I haven't done that since I was a baker. And when you're a baker it's different. You're awake, but it's all autopilot. You throw on some techno or punk music, drink coffee from a sippy cup, and throw flour and yeast into the giant mixer that whirs like a weird droning bass track on your CD, which you play over and over because changing it with flour crusted fingers ruined the last two CDs.
Responsibility is chasing me down. Soon I'll be doing yoga in the mornings again or something awful. I've already ended up at the gym at 6AM a few times - just me and the moms on their way to the kind of job where you wear very low key yet tasteful clothes.
And this is definitely the future I've chosen for myself. I've asked for this, chased it down and all that. Paid good money and given up vampire-novel reading time to read books on how to be the kind of person who wakes up at 6AM to go to the gym, bake muffins, and draw up plans for book-reading events.
I'm happy about that. But I just can't make the voice in the back of my head shut up. The voice that comes from reading too many issues of World Policy Journal and Punk Planet one year in Seattle, the year right after the World Trade Organization riots. There were political magazines everywhere, and I dated an older french guy who was a member of the International Workers of the World, and I thought I'd be a hippy-punk-goth artist who broke all these boundaries and always wore green lipstick and smoked exotic cigarettes and hung out in coffeeshops in tall black boots talking about the Zeitgeist with immigrant boys.
And it was fun. It was cool. It was hip. But all those people were awfully lonely, somehow. It seems like if you want to feel warm and fuzzy inside, you have to live a warm, fuzzy life. And that means working out and going on lunch dates and doing grownup things. It means cleaning the toilet and scrubbing the kitchen floor and taking out the trash and paying attention to the details. Because glamourous decay isn't very glamourous when it descends into unscrubbed dishes and a weird smell under the sink and boys who never wash their hair because that would rinse out all the elmers glue they use to keep it sticking up, and poets who write endless moody sad verse and whose clothes always smell like stale drugs.
My apartment smells like curry, and all my furniture matches. My husband is sitting on the couch. I don't live with crazy lesbians anymore. I don't walk around in full punk regalia and hippy jeans, or do any of those things. But I still write moody poetry and hang out in coffee shops and put things off that one extra day to read the latest novel by Laurell Hamilton or Kim Harrison or Charlaine Harris. (Or Tamora Pierce or...)
So I dunno know. I try to tell myself that I can be cool, and still grow up. But there's not a lot of models for that floating around, and sometimes I wonder how it can be done. I've met lots of cool fifty year olds, sixty year olds. But it seems like thirty and forty are decades that are more about getting things done, in between periods of cool. I suppose that's good too. I'll have to see. It still makes me edgy though.
