Saturday, March 17, 2007

tomorrow, will it really come? and if it does come will i still be human?

Ugh, my brain feels so blocked lately! I have all these projects that I'm anxious to work on, and yet I feel like accomplishing anything is an uphill battle. I need a change of scenery. I wanted to venture out today, but it's far too snowy.

I spoke with K briefly on Thursday and we've made tentative plans to go on holiday together in February or March of 2008. Destination? Budapest for a few days, and then somewhere beachy in the Mediterranean to relax. This gives me something to look forward to, which I think I've needed lately. I haven't been abroad in a year, and it'll be almost two by the time I take this trip. I'd like to start whittling down my list of places I want to visit.

I'm unsure of what I want anymore. Well, not that I've ever been entirely sure, but now I feel as though I should stop coasting. I'm 26, and while I'm not quite old enough to have everything sorted out, I'm not so young anymore that I can fritter away months and years without any particular direction. Do I really want to stick around Rochester? If not here, then where? And doing what? Should I just leave it all to chance and apply for jobs everywhere and anywhere I would consider living? I don't think it's a bad idea to cast my net wide, but I'm just so weary of moving and I want to make certain that the next place fits. I'm unbelievably itchy to plant roots and nest.

MB and I had dinner at Cibon last weekend and I talked about it a little bit over champagne martinis. So many of our peers (including ourselves) have a vague sense of arrested development; that we should have our lives sorted out by now, or at the very least be working towards all the things that define adulthood in our society - a career, property, a family. We seem to be consciously putting all that off. We're afraid (or unwilling?) to commit to our lives as they are. There are certainly exceptions, but just about every 26-29 year old I talk to will say "Oh, right now I'm doing [whatever] but I only for another few years." Or, "I'm not planning on staying here long, maybe a year or two." Only half of them have ideas of what they'd like to replace these "meantime" jobs and locations with. Incidentally, all those long-term relationships that spanned my friends' mid-twenties are over, and almost everyone is single again.

It's comforting to know that I'm not the only one going through this, but at the same time I'm wondering if our idealism is leading us astray since we don't seem to act on it. There's no precedent for our generation, so it's difficult to tell if everything will work out or if we'll end up with a lot of varied and wonderful personal experiences but little lasting contribution. We have made few, if any, sacrifices. In fact, I wonder if it's even misleading to speak of "our generation." I feel that, if anything, we're so insular and obsessed with our individual paths that there is no coherence to our collective age group.

Anyway, I'll figure something out. I think I need to psych myself up about moving again. The prospect of starting over somewhere new used to thrill me, but now it leaves me feeling exhausted. I don't want to stay in Rochester for the wrong reasons (i.e., because I'm too lazy to pull up stakes and start over again), but at the same time I don't want to relocate naively either (i.e., because I think life will be entirely different somewhere else). I just want to make sure I'm not robbing myself of opportunities by sitting still.

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