I wonder at what point my formative years will end and the formidable ones will begin.

What did God get me for my birthday?
Renal failure.

Just kidding, but only sort of.
I spent all of yesterday in bed after a morning visit to the doctor revealed that I wasn’t going anywhere.
Today, I napped in my desk chair at work.
I’m dehydrated, achy, and worst of all, fiercely ill-tempered.

So far twenty-three isn’t that great.

But hey, I guess the only place to go is up!

Ely pointed out to me that men might find me intimidating.
He was hasty to add that he doesn’t.
Of course not, dear.

We’re at a concert, I’m pushing my way to the front, wiggling into the space at the bar, all the while talking to him about a man we’ve both met briefly and that we mutually despise. Maybe despise is a strong word.
I’m sure it sounded something like, “blah blah blah blah blah…and then he gave her this and that and then wrote this.”

That’s when he stops me. “You wonder why men find you intimidating? It’s because of that.” A romantic gesture? And I roll my eyes?

I was puzzled. He’s probably right.
But then again, I’ve never been subjected to romantic overtures.
After that weird first date back in high school, there were roses, and there was a CD of songs that reminded him of me on it. One of them was this song.
So that was awkward.
The string of bad attempts at love could go on, but to spare us all, I won’t.
So perhaps I’m jaded. Or inexperienced. Or just cynical.

I turn back to him. “I liked it when you made me waffles,” I say, as though that would be some sort of explanation. (I actually don’t like waffles. Don’t tell him. They’re good, just not something I go out of my way for.)

Later that night, we’re walking home. I say something rude. (In my defense, it wasn’t that rude; he has delicate ears.) “Again,” he says.
I’m incredulous. How is that intimidating?
He explains.
I argue.
(I begin to understand what he means, but that annoys me, so I argue more.)
We concede (or maybe I do and forget to tell him) that men are mostly moronic and “chivalrous” at all the wrong times, and there’s no reason I should have to conform to some lady-like ideal when we’re breaking gender barriers daily.

***
We’ll flash forward to last night.

I went up to Boulder to return his watch and retrieve my water bottle. (I’m glad that both of us seem to lose stuff. Or maybe his was an isolated incident.)

Last week, I was trying to be cute and I asked him to make me dinner someday. So he told me that if I went up to Boulder, he would.

I was thrown off my game. We cooked.
I am inept. We were going to bread tofu and I (I’m cringing even now as I replay this in my mind) pour the egg into the flour.
Uncle Mike White will appreciate how much I got made fun of over the next hour.
Constantly.
I was not born to cook.
He has a surprisingly snarky side.
I like it.

It’s rare that someone is completely un-readable, and yet he is, and I’m intrigued.
We’ve cobbled together a slow friendship based on the things we have in common (zero).
And I’m curious.
And that’s good.

There we were last night, sitting side by side in a sushi restaurant, contemplating the meaning of our twenties.

Is 23 your mid-twenties? Or are you lucky if you get to push that off until you’re 24? By 29, have you resigned yourself to the approach of 30?

I’m about to turn 23. I always thought that by 23, I’d be this successful, beautiful, somehow totally organized person. Obviously, that was some sort of pipe dream. Jacob laughed when I told him this. “I don’t feel any older,” he said. “Do I look older?”
“I still see all of us the same way I saw us when we were 17,” I told him. And that’s true. In my mind, somehow, I stopped aging at some point and am still 17. It happened previously around the age of 12, when I became aesthetically aware of myself for the first time. That sounds weird, but it was at that point that I became incredibly self-conscious about the way I appeared to other people.

And now, since I’m still battling the ravages of teenage acne and adjusting to the newly developed hips, I don’t feel glamorous or 23. I just feel like I’ve entered adolescence all over again. Navigating the adult world is much like navigating your freshman year of high school. Or even freshman year of college. It’s exciting, and it’s fun, but it’s also really scary, and at no point do you ever feel comfortable or adequate. But looking back, you realize if you’d just taken ten deep breaths and calmed the fuck down, you’d have been fine. Because you were fine.

It was all in your head.

Not to say that I’m not happy or infinitely more confident and secure than I was at 14. Even the last two years have brought about phenomenal personal and spiritual (and maybe even some intellectual) growth.

We were sitting next a lone woman, eating dinner and worrying about something showing up on her receipt. Business trip, I thought. She carried herself with a nervous air, as though this was the first time she’d found herself eating dinner alone in a strange city.
Next to her sat the woman who somehow doesn’t look like she belongs in Denver. Her feet clad in Christian Louboutins, her hat cocked just so to accentuate her styled blonde hair, her facial features swathed in soft layers of mkeup. But reeking of privilege and confidence. (Not that those have to fall together. But they might. And do.)
And there I sat. Feeling 22.

But then dinnner came and my fears were washed away as I realized that there are parts of me that surpass some 30 year olds.

Jacob and I spent the after dinner moments scribbling awkward drawings on the back of the receipts and I realized that I’d never give up my youth to masquerade as someone I’m not and will never be.

Maturity isn’t an outward characteristic, not something you can buy in 24 carat gold. (Ew, don’t ever buy me anything gold, thanks.) That posturing doesn’t show depth of character, or taste, or class. It shows that you’ve got money to burn (although I’d happily burn some for these). 

And so as we walked up the entrance ramp to the West deck of Cherry Creek mall discussing the disparity between doing what you love and doing what you have to do to survive, I felt secure.

Go confidently in the direction of your dreams, they say. I’m off, marching confidently onwards, it’s just too bad I have no idea where that is.

Beautiful day, beautiful mood.
Is there anything better?

My mouth is gin dry, my hair limp, my body sore, and my mind gorgeously foggy.
My attention span is zapped; my day smacks of endless repetition; I am content. (Every time I write a triadic sentence, I flash back to Mr. Hilbert’s classroom. I am 17 again. AP English is the bane of my existence. I’ll never forget Mary Hayes’ sentence:  He was grotesque; he was ugly; he was my prom date. – or something to that affect.)
These are the waning days of my youth, after all.

The night began with the procedures of self-preservation and ended with the tossing out of all best intentions, but doesn’t that describe the best nights?

Woke up surrounded by cloud-white sheets. Rolled over and groaned at the coming day.

Oddly fulfilled.

I also have some nasty dubstep playing. There is not enough RedBull in the world to contain me. Or to fuel my future.

Off to be productive, to produce, to hit the grind….whatever it is that the corporate world might be.

On a sidenote, my desk is a hand-me-down (obviously). It’s full of odds and ends, and they’re all perfect for someone with my small attention span. My current obsession? A stamp that simply says “Acknowledgement.” We are nearly paperless, although I find myself stamping things just so I can see the remnants of the 80s business mentality on paper. Acknowledgement.

It’s almost as good as the PostIt that said “Relocate.” Apparently I wrote it, although I’m not sure what for or why. I got into work one day, and there it was, sitting on my computer. “Relocate.” I was furious – they don’t want me? They don’t like me here and the subtle reminder was there. Relocate.
Turns out, I had set it there. Of course. It was a cute joke for awhile.

Love your day, love your life.

Also, I miss Carlos. Jacob has him. And they’re happy. I’m jealous.

Don’t read my blog today.
Take 20 minutes and watch this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdOcjKsUqOI

I’m free now. I’ll still wonder, I guess, but I know what should have been.

The tears threatened to bubble up to the surface, but they never came and as the feeling ebbed away, I began to smile.

I’ll never be that person, but at least I’m still me.

This week was weird food week for me.
Jacob and I were grabbing coffee downtown on Tuesday night, and on the walk back to my car, we spotted a random assortment of vegetables laying on the sidewalk. Of course I stopped to take a picture. They lay there in the dark, an oddly phallic assortment of forgotten food.
I thought little of it.

I went home, parked on 17th and as I was walking back toward my house, I saw an entire bag of English muffins sitting there by the sidewalk.
So I took a picture.

I realized later that it was dumb to take two pictures of weird food coincidences, but then today, it finally hit me.
I was driving up Colorado Blvd to grab a salad from the grocery store when I saw tubs of Blue Bell (brand new to Colorado) ice cream melting all over the median. Thank god it’s not summer and the tubs won’t start to stink immediately, but someone is still going to have to come and clean them up.
And who leaves food like that?

I got back to the office and took the plastic off of my salad. And then took more plastic off of the toppings. And then unwrapped the plastic fork and removed the plastic off of the plastic carton of salad dressing included in the plastic package.
See where I’m going with this?

Plastic. Food.

Maybe now that I’m working in a confined space (read: an office), I find myself often eating perishables in disposable cartons. Or eating non-perishables in disposable cartons.
I have a set of lovely reusable food containers. (Ah, Costco, where would we be without you?) I bring yogurt in them. I have stained them orange with spaghetti sauce residue. I have microwaved them and washed them and refrigerated them, and they come home with me daily.
I’m satisfied to use them, because I know they are about as sustainable as plasticware gets. I’ll reuse them until either I lose them (which is bound to happen at some point) or until they become broken and old. But they’re sturdily made and chances are high that my $30 investment (that’s a high estimate) will be well worth it for both me and the environment.

But waste.
Food gets wasted.
It happens.
But it happens too often.
Mike and I are constantly battling the fresh food problem. We want fresh food. We buy fresh food. We watch that fresh food become less and less fresh until it’s no longer fresh food. We throw it out.
The cycle begins anew.

I remember being sixteen and having a seriously depressed thought about a spoon at Dairy Queen. (Oh god, that’s embarrassing.) When you drop a spoon on the floor, it gets thrown away. It’ll never touch anyone’s lips. It’s now been rendered useless. And that bothered me. It was created to be a spoon, to bring ice cream joy to the lips of greedy consumers. But now it never would. It will spend the rest of its days (weeks, months, years, centuries, millenia) languishing in a landfill, wrapped in plastic, surrounded by paper cups and napkins, and other plastic spoons, rotting slowly back into the Earth.

But they won’t rot, really. Not within a decent timeframe.

This is why it is of the utmost importance that people start recognizing their own consumption and thinking about it. (Thoughts are where all real change starts.) Don’t recycle because it’s cool, recycle because of that poor red spoon. Recycle because you can and should. Recycle.

And stop wasting food.
I’m guilty of it, too. We all are.
Stop leaving half empty beer cans. Drink up.
Stop letting your spinach rot.
Stop buying the 5lb carton of strawberries at Costco (I’m so guilty of this…I do it every time) because it’s cheaper than 2lbs at the grocery store.

I’m not going to the use the hungry-child-in-Africa excuse because it’s not really that valid as far as your own personal food consumption goes. Sending someone your spinach isn’t going to work. Eating something extra even though you don’t want to will just make you fat. It’s a no-win situation. They’re still hungry and now you’re dealing with the onset of adult diabetes.

So much for saving the world.

Only buy what you need. And sometimes, even though it may be laden with preservatives that might mummify your insides, it might be better to buy it canned, or frozen, or not at all if you know you’re not going to use it right away.

Just a small public service announcement and personal reminder.