tristane

You know you are starting to grow up when people around you complain about not having a job for the summer and ask you if you have any contacts to fix it - and you do.
This insight struck me today when my something-like-boyfriend asked me if I had any suggestions for his bread earning activities in the summer. Without thinking too hard I could come up with at least three different people I could contact, all within in the same city. Dazzled I wondered when this had happened. When did I get to know so many people? And when did they all start getting decent jobs? Last time I checked we were all living the carefree days of university students, drinking the days away between intense periods of essays and exams.

When did we all grow up?

With these questions spinning in my head I also started examining my own plans. I was going to Cork to work for a year tops and then go back to Sweden for another five years and then finally hit the job market again, this time with a degree, at the age of twenty-nine.

Twenty-nine.

At twenty-nine my mother held a post as a librarian at the local library with a husband, a car, two children and a house with a white picket fence. I was five and my mother was the godess of the free world, older and wiser than the Sphinxes of Egypt.
What will have become of me when I am twenty-nine? Will I, too, have found my way to a home, a husband and become the goddess of a smaller combinations of the two of us? Is that the way it goes?

When I was young I - like we all did - woved to not become like my parents. My parents were dull and had lost all sense of fun. My mom wanted to go to England for our vacation to look at the pretty houses and gardens. I frowned and loudly declared that houses were the most boring thing next to watching dust bunnies propagate.
Ten years later I almost bit my tounge off when I, walking through one of the more piqturesque parts of old town Lund, suddenly heard my self exclamate:
- Oh, look at that pretty house!
Now it happens so often I hardly notice it anymore.

I think none of us can avoid to in some way grow into the suit of our parents. They leave an unmistaken mark on our identities, whether we like it or not, and at some point or another I believe we will all get that breathtaking insight that we have sometime during the night become adults. We realize that drinking all night isn't all that much fun the next morning, that the idea of hitch hiking across Thailand has lost its glamour and that interior decoration magazines are really quite fascinating. Suddenly we can't understand how we could ever consider travelling without a decent wardrobe, how convenient it would be with a Volvo combi ("for the extra luggage space") and one day we're standing outside our suburb house putting up a handpainted name sign on the white picket fence.

I fear the day when I will discover red-white checkered curtains in my kitchen.

Today I have almost six years left until my twenty-ninth birthday. Six years ago from now I was a shy seventeen year old high school student who had just gotten her very first job at the casino in the neighbouring town. Looking back I was so inexperienced and innocent, although I at the time I thought of myself as an adult.
It is a sweet irony how I at the time thought of myself as an adult without really being one. Now desperately shun the thought and, although I know I am way too young to feel that way, dearly wish that I was twenty-one and carefree again.

As the last remains of the weekend swiftly pass and leave me older by the second I sit in silent reverence of my life and how it has turned out so far. I am twenty-three, going on twenty-four. I have been in two continents, lived in (soon) three different countries and, with a short prayer to Erin the goddess of Chaos, repeatively thrown myself out into the world in heedless fly-or-die adventures in which I to this day have managed to keep afloat.
My facebook account is full of people which I have met and parted with in my journeys, and each seems a monument of the inevitable adult life that is hoovering at the horizon, closer now than ever before, as their occupations reveal our position when instead of a neverending lines of "student", reads row after row of positions; chief of sales, bar manager, telephone operator, waitress, teacher, head of steel production, geologist, engineer, copy writer, web designer, police officer, project leader, social worker, photographer, professional dancer, actor, nurse, priest, landscape architect, taxi driver, secretary, economist...

And resignated, and with a tiny hint of sadness, I conclude that somewhere along the way I strayed from being a seeker, and became old enough to be the guide.