POPPING OUT BABIES AND QUESTIONS: DAMN WORLD MOVIN’ FAST AFTERALL

Hey folks,

Happy Monday! Pah, this sucks. Well, it is a Monday afterall, I suppose you can’t expect much better from it. I’ve been, well, at home most of the weekend, heh… That really doesn’t suffice for a reasoning of why I hadn’t posted. Well, I suppose it is simply because I have felt, save for this nagging post issue, uninspired. Overall, quite blah. Apparently, so have my colleagues.

Well, I said starting this that I’d try and avoid getting all personal and mushy with you, as that bores me and plays into the stereotype of lonely, has-no-life-to-speak-of blogger. However, this is really getting to me, so bear with me. As of right now, I am twenty years old. Not that old, not old enough to even complain about age or not look forward to the passage of another year. Yet, I’m realizing something and it hits me like a brick: I am no longer really a youth either. That ideal, in itself, doesn’t even bother me. I couldn’t care less at this point about age groups made only for statisticians, it is the simple consequences of that which boggle my mind.

Like the fact my peers are starting to get married. Yeah, it’s just weird you know… I mean, I’m more than happy for all those folks, but as the still-single academic who has no plans of heading down that road for awhile yet, I tend to be somewhat disconcerted for them and for me. I mean, for them it might just be a bit early and really in a lot of cases it is. So I tend to worry for acquaintances who do such things. At the same time, though, I worry that I myself am being disjointed from the very people I grew up with, well even more than usual but you get what I mean. I just don’t see myself getting married anytime soon, but it honestly makes me sometimes feel so socially stunted when people are at that stage of their life, while I’m… well, not even close.

The only thing that makes me feel even more out of step with people my age, and even younger, is that their actually having kids themselves. Oi, I still don’t know how to react when someone as young as myself is having a kid. I mean, they’re hopefully taking it as adults and making their own well informed choices, but sometimes not. Even so, however, it’s perfectly normal to start having kids around twenty if you really wanted to, I suppose. Really, I don’t care if someone does in terms of ‘normalcy’ as such social mores are pointless. Yet, I wonder to myself how these people if they’re casting off education to start a family will make it in a world which is more and more often Post-secondary-centric.

Though in the end, what this really does is wake me up to the reality that soon enough, if I want it ever to reach it, that time of my life will be upon me. To be honest, it scares me a little… I am by no means ready to accept the responsibilities for another life nor do I see myself building a family within the next decade, haha. One can’t predict the future, but I have a plan for myself which includes a PhD and a long time in University. I mean plans are hollow casts into the shadowy world of the future, but really… I’m just not ready to be where some of my friends are at.

Then how do I relate to them? It is an honest quandary when so many people are nesting while a few of us are climbing the ladder to the Ivory Tower. I mean, I still want to relate to the general people around me, well… as much as I ever do, being the head-in-the-clouds academic or raging advocate, depending on the mood I’m in. Gah, maybe I worry too much… but maybe not.

I mean I only have two years left of my Bachelor’s Degree. Two years! That’s nothing. Soon, I’ll be leaving where I live with honestly no hope of returning to live permanently. How bleak, but true, for most who live in Newfoundland and walk the path I choose to. I’m going off and away to other places in the country and the world soon. It really is like this inevitable wall which sits just beyond my sights… I can  see the outline near the sun and feel the ground beneath me rushing by.

Maybe I’m getting ahead of myself, but maybe not… Everything is just moving so fast now and I don’t totally know what to do with it. Wow, what a whiny blog post this is! Ugh, I wish I could be conclusive with all these thoughts and clue everything up in a nice package with a bright bow… but I can’t. It’s life and the questions I have will be answered in time, only to be replaced with more…

And maybe, that’s the fun of it all.

Enjoy folks,
- Brad.