You knew this was coming...

It fucks with your psyche when you run into childhood friends that you haven’t seen since high school with the exact same face that you remember, but from the neck down looking like men and women. They wear rings on their left fingers along with loafers and Banana Republic slacks, and talk about their respective medicine and law post graduate programs.

I feel that is what life is like in my 20s. The contradictory moments where I am astounded how I find the maturity to handle a situation, and then I immediately take out my pink bedazzled cell phone to call my mom and tell her the news.

When I graduated college, I thought in addition to receiving the degree written in Latin the school would also confer the label “grown-up.” Telling me that I used up all of my get-drunk-during-the-day-and-sleep-till-noon coupons and that I was now ready to go forth and become a productive member of society. But graduation day was anti-climatic. With the degree in my hand I still wore the same ratty MHC sweatshirt as I packed my dorm room into five plastic hefty trash bags that ended up at the back of the family station wagon. The promises of how I was going to change the world falling flat when I had to move back home and couldn’t even change the rules of my parent’s house.

As my generation delays the onset of “responsibility” with postponing marriage and children and moving back home because of the sky high rents in metropolitan areas and taking extra time to “find ourselves”, when is it we earn the title of grown-up? I’m expecting the fan fare of a Bat Mitzvah, then finding a closet filled with Donna Karan business suits.

However, I am learning that I cannot define the term grown-up only along my terms. Much like all of the kids from high school who either directly or indirectly helped shape me into the person that I’ve grown into, their maturation reflects my own. Even if I am not on the path where I thought I would be at this age or acting with the social grace of Jackie O, I am growing up because the people around me are. I have no control over time. But I do have control over what I do with it.

Now, fuck these changing priorities. Why can’t I ever keep anything figured out? Just when I thought I did, I get a curve ball that makes me revaluate my assumptions. Watch, pretty soon this blog will be called “Sober! How I Found the Way With Jesus”