Older Than Young

My birthday was last week, I turned 22 years old. Patton Oswalt has a bit where he talks about how many birthdays, meaning the big deal, celebration, the whole shebang, a person should be allowed and what ages those birthdays are.

Needless to say, as I can’t do anything new and haven’t been alive for a whole ‘nother decade, my 22nd birthday wasn’t anything special. No crazy party, nothing super memorable other than going to Epcot the weekend before. It came and went and I thought nothing much of it.

But a couple days after my actual birthday, an acquantance was walking past and, whilst wishing me a happy belated birthday, asked, “How old are you, 21?” When I replied 22, he shouted “Holy shit!” and kept walking. But I had to stop and think about what just happened. See, I think of myself as a pretty young human being in the grand scheme of things. Considering that a lot of people are living to 70 these days, I figure I wouldn’t start being ‘old’ until I was at least 30. But is 21 it?

Am I old now?

OK, maybe the definition of old depends on your peers. I mean, when we were 6, someone who was 14 was old, and these days I think of 14 year olds as practically fetuses. But when I thought about it, I realized that even I thought that, all of a sudden, I was old. That the threshold in my head for old is somehow set at “greater than 21”.

And I got really, really scared.
For a moment, I felt compelled to plan out the rest of my life, to figure out where I’d like to live and work, and I got even more scared when I realized that there are just too many variables to account for to do that. All those thoughts of “When I grow up” suddenly applied to that very moment, all the promises to become more responsible and hard-working as an adult suddenly became things that I had to start doing tomorrow morning. Work out, eat right, go to bed early, suddenly I was living my entire life WRONG. I realized I don’t know how to do anything of value, no marketable skills, no knowledge of a subject that someone would pay me for, not even a set of recipes under my belt so that I could keep myself alive without eating at Wendy’s every night.

Of course, I eventually sat down, took a breath and thought about it. And I realized that the majority of the people I know probably feel the same way at this point in their lives. I mean, we’ve all been taken care of and provided for by our parents pretty much entirely up to now. Most of us aren’t ready to be ‘adults’, as much as we say we are, most of us can’t really cook beyond sticking things in the oven for 30 minutes and then taking them out, most of us are either fresh out of college or on our way to grad schools. We might be old, but that doesn’t mean that we have to go out and become the rulers of the world tomorrow.

On the flip side of that, I am going to spend a little more time in the kitchen. Getting my ass up early and doing some pushups couldn’t hurt, eating Taco Bell a little less often and starting my homework earlier than the night before it’s due is probably a good idea. I’m not saying that at 22 you need to have everything figured out and be on your way out the door.

But maybe we should realize the deadline for adulthood is closer than we all realize. And if we want to keep ourselves from moving back in with Mom and Dad at 33, a little practice for being ‘grown ups’ might not be a bad idea.

My Brain Only Has Two Settings

One of the main issues I have as an incredibly intelligent human being is that I tend to either think way too much about things or not think about them at all. For instance, I've been known to sit agonizing over whether or not to spend 30 bucks (that I actually had) on a video game. Bear in mind that, as a 21 year old college student whose campus is 30 minutes away from home, about 98% of all my bills are payed by my parents and the money I have can be spent on pretty much anything I want. But still, I try to weigh all the pros and cons out in my head, thinking about how much I really NEED this game, the fact that no one really NEEDS a video game, what else I could spend that money on, the worry that I'll find something later costing the same amount that I'd like to have more...

I'm gonna need about a hundred of these.

It goes on and on like that.

But ask me what I think about world hunger? Nothing. It doesn't really affect me at all, if it did there wouldn't be anything I could do about it, and I have virtually no power to affect that problem anyway. So I don't think about it, and the fact that other people think about it so much is really odd to me.
This is not to say that I don't care about other people, I just picked that issue cause it was the first one that came into my head. But see, I'm doing it again! As soon as I finished that last paragraph, I immediately started thinking about what people would think if they thought I didn't care about starving kids, and the insane chain reaction that could occur (as unlikely as it is that the Internet would revolt against me, that's what I pictured).

What's worse is I feel like the set of things that I think a lot about is the set of things that everyone else manages to not think about at all. I'm trying to puzzle out what I should do in a relationship, and all I see around me is people just making a decision and moving on, easy peasy. People are having deep, philosophical discussions in the cafeteria (I go to a liberal arts college, don't ask), and all I'm thinking is "Meaning of life seems like it would be subjective happiness. Done. I wonder if the ice cream machine is working?"

I think my brain rationalizes by only devoting thinking time to things that I can conceivably find real answers to. I mean, I could sit under a tree thinking for 20 years and never find a satisfactory answer to the meaning of human existence. But whether or not I want the new Pokemon game? THAT I know how to figure out. I just wish I didn't have to devote all my brainpower to issues like that sometimes.

Cause frankly, I'm pretty sure Pokemon doesn't deserve all my brain power. After all, I'm gonna need at least 2 hours to figure out what I want for breakfast.

You See, What Had Happened Was...

Woah, I finally escaped the distant past! See, the reason I haven't posted in forever is because I got sucked into this CRAAAAZY time portal that transported me to the year 230 AD.

 

 

 

It also transformed me into a white dude wearing flip-flops. Weird.

And then I had to fight Mongols and dinosaurs and Bruce Willis showed up and...


OK. Truth time. I didn't actually get sucked into the past, no wacky hi-jinks were preventing me from writing stuff. I didn't even get horribly injured or a job that requires more effort than absolutely none. Truth is, writing got harder than I thought it would, so I quit. With the best of intentions, and always intending to start again, but I still gave up on it. Which may, in fact, be one of the most hypocritical things I've done in a long, long time.

You see, I'm one of those people that looks around at my peers and is a little disappointed a lot of the time. I'm very critical of those around me, even if I have enough sense to know that most of the time it's not a big deal. But I especially hate to see the people around me giving up when I know FOR A FACT that if they tried a little harder, they could have exactly what they want.

People who bemoan the fact that they are out of shape, but don't want to go to the gym.
People who wish that that the person they want to notice them would notice them, but can't even start a conversation with them.
People who give up halfway through because it got too hard.

And that's exactly what I did. Which makes me a super-hypocrite, since I consider myself qualified to hand out advice that, apparently, I haven't been taking.

So, consider this my formal apology: I'm sorry, Internet. Especially to those few special people out there who personally told me that they like what I do on here and didn't understand why I stopped. I'm really sorry. I will expect better of myself in the future, and I will do my best to keep writing my thoughts and finding silly things to show you guys in the future. Stuff like this:

Cats are either awesome or hate-filled sacks with claws. It's in the Bible.

OK, now that's out of the way. I'm looking into shifting this thing-a-whosit to Tumblr cause frankly, it looks way cooler than the amateur hour crap-fest I've got going on at the moment. But I'll give you guys the heads-up and keep posting on here until that actually happens. And I jumped onto the Twitter bandwagon, so feel free to follow me on there or just check out the live feed box on the blog to see all the random thoughts that pop into my head.

OK? OK.

P.S New rule: at least two posts a week from now on. If I don't hold up my end, feel free to find me and beat me with PVC pipe.