When I see the price you pay...

In the past few weeks there have been car attacks, two babies born, gadgetry won, new jobs and rumours of new jobs. All of these rapid changes are off-putting. Furthermore, all of these changes seem to be happening mostly to my friends on the distaff side. It's starting to make me think. Unfortunately, my capacity for deep thought was violently removed sometime during University and Retail. I'll do the best I can.

We're growing old. It doesn't frighten me. I wouldn't know how to characterize the emotion it invokes exactly. At times, adulthood seems like a really simple answer to what I thought was an incredibly complex and distressing question. As a child, I differed from a lot of my friends in one important respect: I didn't want to grow up. While the other boys would talk excitedly about what they would be when they reached maturity; I had a different answer. Instead of wanting to be a lawyer or a doctor, I had something different in mind. I wanted to be a ten year old boy.

Of course there were certain jobs I wanted. Comic book artist, writer, musician. But that desire that my friends had, the overriding desire for adulthood, that I never had. I never understood my friends either who wanted it. With my preferred jobs, it seemed like I could do them and still somehow be a child. I felt it was obvious there wasn't a great deal to be gained by being an adult, and a great deal to lose. From what I observed from the adults I knew, being an adult didn't really recommend itself well. It seemed like a punishment for some undefined sin. They seemed so unhappy. I promised myself that I would somehow-magically-remain the same age. Even if my body grew, even if I learned more, I would still somehow maintain my innocence.

I still don't think that adulthood has much to recommend itself. Giving up that capacity for wonder and joy for paying taxes, failed relationships, sex and mundane jobs seem to me to be a ludicrously cruel and unbalanced exchange. The few consolations there do seem to be in the renewal and affirmation of youth; either through the maintenance of friendships or through the actual bearing of children. One of my few consolations is the deep and increasingly sophisticated friendships that I've been allowed to maintain. On certain nights I look around my apartment and think So it happened to me anyway. It's a bittersweet realization. I imagine it's how Esau must of felt five minutes after he got the pottage. You're tired, exhausted, and confused. Then someone somehow cheats you out of something precious.

None of this means that I'm not proud and happy of what everyone has accomplished. It just surprises me that the regular cycles of life-Marriages, jobs, children-had to happen to us too. I thought we were exempt. For some reason, I though we would be different.