Specters of adulthood

I’ve recently started being able to appreciate Alanis Morrisette’s Jagged Little Pill albulm. What am I? Some kind of angsty young adult? Nah. This is a bizarre age for me. I have too much unjaded enthusiasm to feel like an adult, but enough awareness of my growing responsibilities to not feel like an adolescent. A strange in between. Specters of adulthood?

A few things have happened in the last few months that have made me feel like an adult. One is that my Surrey buddies have started bringing wine to parties. I feel like I’ve learnt to drink beer by watching these guys. They elevated my feet in my first keg stand, held the bong in my first beer bong and now they are drinking wine. Cheese HAS made an appearance, but in a zip lock bag, not on a platter. This whole thing concerns me because growing up in Surrey consisted mainly of drinking beer with these guys while learning valuable life lessons and making irresponsible choices. Does moving from beer to wine mean that there are no more lessons to be learnt, no more poor choices to be made? Is wine some kind of symbolic shift from adolescence to adulthood? Does sitting around a table drinking wine make us adults? Nah. The other events that made me feel like an adult happened within a few days of each other last December. We had to put Purdy down, then my bike got stolen. We’ve had Purdy almost as long as we’ve lived in the Surrey house and it hasn’t really felt like home since the quieting of her footsteps. She chewed on my Cabbage Patch dolls, my Barbies, my school books and eventually on the edges of the boxes I was moving out with. I got to go home to Surrey when we did it, but returned to Sasamat to find my bike had been stolen. The same bike I rode to the candy store as a pre-teen and would later ride around UBC and Kits. I wondered if losing my childhood pet and bike in the same week made me an adult. Then Greg and I both came home for Christmas from our respective houses. I asked him if the fact that we both called other houses our homes made us adults. We concluded the answer was no… mainly because this conversation took place at the Mirage. Too old to be at the Mirage, but definitely not adults.

So if moving out, drinking wine and being both pet and bike-less doesn’t make me an adult what will? Alanis Morrisette went to India after Jagged Little Pill and moved from angsty young adult to adult contemporary/easy listening, but she lost that anguished edge in the process. That was HER symbolic change. Maybe her childhood dog died while she was over there. This all assumes that my adulthood will result from some dramatic, or not so dramatic, event. In reality, I’m sure it is more of a progressional development… a process… a series of events producing change. This is a development that I feel is effectively under way. However, I AM anticipating one symbolic event that will solidify my adulthood and represent my consent into maturity. That event is the purchase of a headboard. Bed and sex symbolism aside, I really do think that I will feel more like an adult when I replace the thirty dollar lopsided steel contraption on wheels that I rest my mattress on for a real adult bed frame with a headboard. There we go, a symbolic shift from squeaky, cheap and awkward adolescence into a self-assured, confident and mahogany adulthood. But for now, I am perfectly happy in my in between state of young adulthood and immaturity… I’m going to go beer bong a bottle of wine and eat cheese out of a zip-lock.