Yo homies, I guess I'm back to the old blog grindstone (that's a saying, right? blog grindstone?). After many libations had been drunk (drank? drinkened? probably drinkened) I was informed that people actually read this nonsensical vanity project of mine, and that they would like me to update more frequently. Enjoy my incoherent babbling about being a giant baby.
A year after graduating from college, after a move to New York, a series of really random jobs that I basically fell into, a move back to Mobile, and a move back to Athens I have realized that I am not even sort of an adult. I joke about this all the time (as do 97% of Americans in their early 20s according to a statistic that I made up to sound more credible), but it's really really true. That's not really the point of this post, though. The point of this post is to discuss the weird habit that people my age have of calling ourselves "old." At first it was funny to talk about how "old" we were because we remember things like cassette tapes and the magical time before cell phones and some of us have jobs and enjoy going to bed at 10 pm, but now it's just gotten kind of weird. So I am here to admit, in front of God and my peers, that I, Julia Siesel Oppenheimer, am 24 and extremely young. I think we've all made the jokes about being old so many times that we're starting to actually believe it, but, the thing is, we've barely lived a quarter of our lives. We've all gotten these ideas so firmly planted in our minds that we're adults and have to settle into our lives already, yet I still have panic attacks at the thought of committing to an apartment lease for more than a year. I know that there are a lot of people who think they have their lives totally figured out and know exactly what they want to do, and to them I say "Congrats!" That really is wonderful. But I am resolutely not one of those people, and I am really sick of being made to feel like some kind of a failure because I don't know what I want to do with my life at the ripe old age of 24. Baby Boomers and The Greatest Generation love to talk about how by the time they were my age they were married with kids and a job. That's what they wanted. That's what they had to do. They're from a time where having a college degree guaranteed a job that you would stay in until you retired. That's not how it works any more. It's 2013 and the economy is in the toilet, so if I want to screw around for a few years and be poor and live in a bunch of different places, that's my decision. It doesn't mean I'm lazy (though I am, extremely) or not as intelligent/talented as the people my age who've mapped out their next 60 years (I'm not), it just means that I'm taking full advantage of all of the opportunities that people in the preceding generations wish they had had. I am a child-adult, and I'm proud of it.
