All grown up and no way to know
My stress dreams still involve tests that I haven't studied for, or end-of-term papers that I had all semester to work on but didn't and are due tomorrow. For a while when I was a photographer, they were all about showing up for an assignment without film, (remember film?) but it wasn't long before my subconscious led me back to high school or, at best, college. It's funny, because I just spent the weekend with a bunch of my college buddies, many of whom I haven't seen in years, and I was talking with one of them about how our being together like that makes us revert to our younger selves. It's true that I did find myself playing a drinking game that involved quarters, lots of spilled beer and rules that strike me now as, at best, juvenile, but I don't feel like I reverted.
It pains me to think of how insecure I was in college. This weekend, all my old friends exclaimed how I hadn't changed a bit in all these years, but I know that's not the case. I feel much better about myself these days. I like to think my hair is better too, (thank you, ABBA.)
I don't feel like I was slipping back to my adolescent self because, self assurance and fabulous locks aside, I don't feel like I ever left it. Even with a three-year-old kid at my side, I am constantly forgetting that I am an adult. Maybe it's the clothes. One of the reasons I became a photographer was so I wouldn't have to buy a suit, and I spent the better part of my professional career running around with cameras and other expensive toys. Now the toys I play with have been downgraded to primary-colored plastic objects, but I still don't have to put on a suit.
Some of my friends this weekend were talking about investments and real estate and multi-million-dollar business deals, and I thought, Jesus! You people sound like my father! Forget about the fact that I heard my mother's words coming out of my own mouth as we all talked about our kids; I still cannot relate to adult conversation. By adult conversation, I think I mean the kind held by people who go to work in nice clothes and live in houses filled with furniture not bought from Ikea or Craig's List.
Maybe one day I'll feel like a grown-up. Though, if having a kid and buying a house hasn't done it for me, I'm not sure what will.
posted by judybat at 9:26 PM
11 Comments:
For the record, your hair pretty darn fabulous back in college. Don't make me bring out the photos. ;-)
Was. Your hair was fabulous. As it is currently. Is what I meant to say.
My 50-year-old father JUST stopped having nightmares of this sort about college a year ago. He says they stopped when he finally decided once and for all that he was never going to go back for his PhD and that his MBA was enough.
I often think that being an adult and being a grown-up are entirely different things.
Who the heck needs to grow up if it means boring conversations?
-Michael
Is feeling like an adult a good thing?
"Grown up" means you get to go to sleep when you feel like it. Unfortunately, I feel more and more like it.
Pig still dreams that Brown is rescinding his MA and that he is again in law school and can't pass. Pigs never grow up. Pigs think that your comparison to your father was not vey nice.
pig only writes in the third person apparently.
cynicali employs that every now and then too.
for the record i would like to note that there were no drinking games at my SB party. whereas that makes me feel vaguely old, it also makes me wonder hom theboy did in flipping those quarters!
I'm not knocking conversations about investments and real estate and multimillion dollar real estate, Pig; I'm just saying I have trouble relating to them.
And it's really no surprise that you're having those dreams, poor Pig, since we're all still waiting for you to grow up. Though I would have placed your emotional age a little closer to grade school than grad school.
I guess I come by it honestly. Who's up for a little handball in the school parking lot?
What I really want to know is what Pig's nonstress dreams include. A stream filled with salmon skin? Dinners spent swapping investment strategies amiably with his good friend Sock Bunny and a rainbow trout?
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