Tag: growing up
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This time last year, give or take a couple of days, I was hand-washing underwear in the bathroom sink of a Motel 6 next to the Dallas – Fort Worth airport after a canceled flight left me stranded. I was on edge because not only was I separated from my luggage (and the rest of…
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My freshman year dorm room was papered in inspirational quotes. I trawled databases of them, cut and pasted relevant ones into a Word doc, changed the font to something scripty, printed out pages and pages and then cut out each saying. I taped most of them to my closet doors. By October, at least a…
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I remember the first time someone accused me of being fretful. It was at a journalism conference in college. I was heading up a committee and my co-leader and I were working late into the night trying to finish some bureaucratic task. I chafed at being told to stop fretting, that everything would be fine.…
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Eventually, after you are proven wrong many, many times, you stop speculating about the future. You stop trying to fix it in one place as if you’re zippering a wriggling toddler into a snowsuit. You make rough drafts of the best and worst case scenarios, maybe throw in an idle daydream or two and you…
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Today’s installment of the American Dream Essay Series comes to us from Brittany Shoot. I “met” Brittany through the comments section of my Bitch blog, but I’m pretty sure there was no swearing involved. A couple of years ago, I wrote my master’s thesis on young people’s ethical right to privacy online. I was absorbed…
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Today’s American Dream guest essay (submissions always welcome) is courtesy of Jessica Balmer. And guess what? JESSICA ISN’T EVEN AMERICAN! Is your mind blown by the universality of this concept yet? Get ready. Get set… Often I feel that this point in my life is equivalent to standing at the edge of a precipice waiting…
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I know I’m almost 30, but I’m still too young to be a dad. Definitely not old enough for kids. So said the all-American stranger in a polo and khaki shorts to his female companion. I was merely eavesdropping from a discreet distance. Photo by Dianna Narotski 30? Too young? Tell that to Swaziland, where…
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Lately, I’ve been seeing a lot of time-based talk floating around – people anxious that others are getting the jump on them, that they should have done more and done it earlier, lamentations about growing older, etc. The clock is ticking after all. Of course, this fretting over age-related accomplishments saddens me. It’s both exhausting…
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New litmus test for personal compatibility: Are you willing to crash a movie set w/ me? Take a rubber bullet to the shoulder if you have to? – Moi via Twitter I knew before I even hung up the phone that I’d made a mistake. An uncharacteristically amateur mistake at that. It’s easier to ask…
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A few months ago, a younger friend asked me what growing up was like, what it felt like to be an adult. I can’t remember exactly what I said, but no doubt it was something facetious and possibly flippant (and most likely I was hanging out in my pajamas when I read her email –…
Generation Meh 