I was curious tonight to see what I had done on this day in previous years, and so I looked back on old blog posts. Last year, I was playing Meteos in Terry's apartment, surly and homeless; the year before, I was moving in to our apartment in Menlo Park and preparing for an epic Super Bowl party in which all of my friends got roaringly drunk while all of Terry's friends tried to watch the game. Around July of 2004 I deleted my earlier blog posts, but I still have them saved on my hard drive, so I looked them up. I remembered that I had deleted them because I sounded whiny, but I can't believe how whiny I was. Apparently, three years ago at this time I was extremely angry and depressed--which, actually, I remembered, but it was interesting to read some of it again.
It's hard to believe that in June, I will have been out of college for four years. I think that I'm starting to feel restless because I haven't had an adventure in awhile. Adventure can be something huge, like touring the Taj Mahal alone with a million annoyingly-insistent would-be tour guides, or crawling out over the edge of a cliff on the Aran Islands; or, it can be something small, like submitting my hair to the ministrations of an Indian hairdresser who washes hair in her kitchen sink (although that turned out well--one of her other clients that afternoon was a former Miss Universe). It can even be figuring out how to make risotto for my friends while trying to avoid catching the plague from Claude. But, it is most certainly not spending the majority of my week in an office, or a gorgeous Saturday afternoon writing the self-assessment I should have written a month ago, or going to Target on a Saturday night because I was too lazy to make plans like a normal twenty-five-year-old.
I'm starting to get that restless urge to chop off my hair and move out of the country, and I find myself daydreaming all too often about Romania, or the windswept Russian steppes, or the wilds of Botswana, or Incan ruins in South America. I refuse to let my life turn into something completely conventional, because then it wouldn't really be mine--it would be something that anyone could live, and I could just be swapped in and out of it like an extra in a movie scene. And yet, I do care rather too much about what other people think of me, and societal pressures (and the need to eat, and clothe myself, and buy Versace sunglasses to lend a touch of glamour to my adventures) make it all too easy to fall into a conventional life. The funny thing is, I do have some conventional desires as well; I'd like to be married someday, and have kids, but only if those kids won't get too unhappy if I pick them up and move them someplace ridiculous at least once in their destined-to-be-absurd lives.
I think that's why I sometimes wish that I could just hurry up and get to the eccentric old lady part; it doesn't matter what people think of eccentric old ladies, because they don't have to answer to anyone. However, I don't want the arthritis and poverty and cat that seems to accompany most eccentric old ladies. I just want to be past the next stage in my life, in which I have to figure out what's next and where I'm going.
I wrote in my self-assessment that I need to focus on setting larger goals so that I actually have something I'm working towards, rather than just working for the sake of working. My company has gotten a lot out of me primarily because of my midwestern work ethic, and not because I'm trying to learn specific skills or get to a certain point in my career development. However, I need to think about what I really want from this life, or else it's going to slip away and become exactly what I've always tried to avoid, and what I've been so disappointed to realize happens to virtually everyone. Now, though, I need to go to sleep, so that I can get something done tomorrow. Goodnight!
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