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.

Still strugglin'

Okay. Entry #2 and I’m still hesitant about this blog thing. I havn’t decided if this should be like a portal into some of my unspoken thoughts and desires or a weekly record of my usual mishaps and misfortunes. Either way, I’m sure it will turn into “Lesley’s Misadventures Through Love and Romance.” (Editors note: too many ‘mis’ words here. What about just adventures? Fortunes? …Haps?) More importantly, the lack of personal communication that blogs bring about continues to unsettle me. I would rather tell you why I am going to England in September over a cup of coffee, I would rather share my ideals of love while lying in bed with a guy I could fall in love with, and I would rather exchange drunken exploits over a beer. Nevertheless, I don’t have many guys at my door asking me to discuss love in their beds so these are three topics that are likely to come up repeatedly on this blog.

I like this. Writing rants down on paper makes me feel good, like writing the letter I talked about in Entry #1. I also have more free time on my hands this summer than I thought I would, so this is probably going to continue. But just like I hated the way the letter made me sound like a crazy girl, I hate the idea of inaccurately portraying myself here in the cyber world. In real life, I'm pretty cool. I’ve been attacked by an ostrich, chased by an erect naked homeless man and have lived next door to BC’s 2nd most wanted. I’ve had a legit schizophrenic roommate and was asked not to sing in our elementary school production of Fiddler on the Roof by the music teacher. Ask me about it. I tell a good story.

It all started with a stumble

I’ve been hesitant to start a blog. The whole thing just seems kind of pretentious. Already I’m sitting in a coffee shop, typing on my Mac and using a Derrida reference in my title. And I wouldn’t have a Mac or know anything about Derrida if it wasn’t for my fancy UBC poli sci degree. See, pretty pretentious. I also have a problem with getting too personal over the internet. Blogs are too onesided and instant messaging tries to be more intimate than it has the ability to be. I’ve made a point of only reading blogs whose authors I already know well, mainly Lisa’s Paris blog. Reading a blog is a terrible way to get to know someone. Sarcasm doesn’t always work on the computer and I’m afraid that these entries are going to come off as far more dramatic than I actually am. It’s a light-hearted look at subtle ironies, not cynicism. It’s a tendency to not take myself seriously, not self-deprecation. So this is only going to work if you and I have already established some kind of non-virtual relationship and you have some grasp of what is and isn’t “Lesley.” This is important. Don’t get to know me over this blog, my facebook page is much more representative.

A while ago I was upset over a guy and typed up a message to him that I had no intentions of ever sending or ever showing anyone. I wrote it just to relieve some stress. It was poetry. It was well written, said everything I wanted to say and subtly called him a douche-bag like three times. The whole thing read like a Ferris Beuller rant. Poetry. I woke up the next morning and showed it to Sophia. She told me later that she was surprised by how mean it was. The more I read the letter the more proud I was of it and the more I contemplated sending it to the guy. I came close, but it made me sound like a crazy girl, and I know I’m not a crazy girl. Now I’ve shown the letter to a lot of my friends and it’s been dramatically read aloud by a number of people. I think this blog is going to run a similar course. Entry #1 has been posted. I don’t intend to make this blog super accessible. Tomorrow I might tell Sophia about it, then within a few days I’ll send the link to a couple more people, but by September it will probably be included in my facebook profile. In case you’re wondering, I never sent the crazy girl rant to the guy. Good idea. In a less than dramatic act of liberation I deleted the word document I had it saved in on my desktop. It was very freeing.

There we go. I’ve reluctantly entered the cyper world of bloggers with an entry about how pretentious I think blogs are. This seems like a good current through which to channel my suburban angst and boredom and eventually document some England adventures. Maybe one day I'll post the letter