Saturday, July 16, 2005

So I just spent my night drinking a glass of Pinot Noir and playing Trivial Pursuit with my Dad. (I'm not going to say who won, and who lost...but maybe if *I* had 25 years on my opponent and had actually LIVED through half of the events that the questions were concerned with, I might have an obvious advantage, too. grrr....) And yeah. I don't know I feel about that.

I feel like I'm increasingly being identified with the parental generation. Today I talked with my sister about keeping a gas log in the car so that neither of us has to pay for gas we're not using. (A system that I thought would be *obviously* mutually beneficial.) I don't know what I expected. "Thank you, Katherine, for taking my financial needs into account as well as your own. You're so nice! I'm so lucky to have such a considerate big sister. Want to go out and do sister things like go to the mall and paint our nails and talk about boys and bind together against common enemies like our other siblings? Jeepers....this'll be great." In retrospect, yeah...maybe that was dumb of me. But all I got was the "Yeah. Sure. Whatever." type of answer and then a closed door.

And suddenly I had a crisis. "What?!!" I shouted. (In my head.) That's....that's what you say to a parent when they're *obviously* trying to make you concerned about something irrelevant and annoying. That's what you say to...you know, not a peer! That's how you blow off an authority figure who only *thinks* they're an authority figure and is not, in fact, the boss of you! Oh god! I was not trying to be the boss of anybody! And all of a sudden I'm an old farty stick in the mud, somehow trying to put a damper on everyone's fun...aaargh! When did I stop being on the late-teens-to-twentysomethings team? I want to be on that team!!

What am I doing wrong?

It wouldn't worry me, except that I feel it happening more and more. Maybe in the past year. Even like, while I'm hanging out with people my own age and not my sister's. And suddenly I feel ancient. And stuffy.

I mean...it's all well and good to be edgy, and you know...forward-thinking. But what happens if sometimes you just think your parents' generation may have it a little more together than our own? When does "forward-thinking" just become a word we use to excuse things? :::sigh:::

I don't know. But now I don't know how old I am. I feel like I'm nowhere near ready to be an actual adult doing actual adult things (like worrying about insurance and playing Bingo with my geriatric friends) but sometimes I look around me and I don't feel like I fit in with the edge, either.

Just don't want to be 80 too soon...

Is there nothing easy these days?

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

here's to being old farts... i was at that drum major camp in IL last week and of course we were sorely outnumbered by HSers. and naturally there were the cheerleader types there too. so the HS boys were all flirtatious with the miss prisses. and then they ran away, and then asked "how old are you?" you know...the typical question..."i'm 14!!" and i wanted to hobble away and sit in my walker. I'M FREAKIN' 7 YEARS OLDER THAN THAT LITTLE GIRL!!! ugh!!
oh, and we found a new roomie (oh yeah, that's cuz the roomie causing housing troubles bailed on us) and this new roomie is 18, has been going to college for 4 yrs and will be majoring in chem. i feel...inadequate...and old farty. :-p kat, come up to SLO and lets drink wine, act pompous, and enjoy our oldness together. hehehehe!

5:31 PM  
Blogger Kat said...

I will be there with bells on, Amy! :)

11:40 PM  

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