My quarter-life crisis

“‘Twilight’ makes me feel old.”

That was the first line of the column that I was going to write for this week. I was going to write about how the Harry Potter premiere being replaced by “Twilight” marked the end of my generation’s youth. Then I realized that I was wrong. My youth had already ended.

I went home this weekend to see my little brother in a play at my high school.

During intermission I mentioned my Harry-Potter-dude-we-are-so-old hypothesis to an old friend and she laughed. Then I ran into to a girl who I graduated with who was four months pregnant. Did I say Harry Potter made me feel old? Nope, I was definitely wrong. Talking about a children’s book when my friend is about to have a child made me feel anything but old. It made me feel one hundred percent juvenile.

This August I went to the first wedding of one of the people who graduated high school with me. It was the weirdest thing ever. Besides ushering in my quarter-life crisis, it left me with a sense of the gravity of life that is absent in my Bloomington world. As I was electric sliding with tipsy, middle-aged women, I couldn’t help but think that in a few years a night of drunk line dancing might become the highlight of my year. Scary. While my weekly schedule includes studying, Facebooking, going to some parties and playing house in my little RPS kitchenette, people my age are struggling to pay the bills and provide for their incipient families. 

Even though I have always worked hard and considered myself a relatively mature and responsible person, I was reminded of just how wonderful, yet not-quite-real my college existence is.

That’s the funny thing about these college years. One minute I’m managing my finances and trying to be a responsible adult-ish person and the next I bringing home my dirty clothes so that my mom can do my laundry for old times’ sake. In this life limbo of sorts, I’m torn between wanting to be older and clinging to my youth.

Juno’s exclamation has become my mantra: “I am dealing with things here that are way above my maturity level.” I realize that getting married at 20 is not necessarily the norm, and neither is maintaining an interest in children’s literature, but I can’t help but feel stuck somewhere in between.

I got a little closer to this reality reckoning this weekend, when I talked to my friend who was having the baby. We laughed about the plays we used to do together, and I wished her luck with everything. It made me realize the defining moments in life aren’t ever quite as definite as I expect them to be.

My friend is still the hysterical homecoming princess that I remember, only now she is going to have “mommy” plopped in front of her name. It made me realize that I am feeling old and young at the same time because I am literally in the middle of life. My plan is to just keep on dealing with life as it comes, and I imagine I will grow up as I need to, and perhaps some day I’ll mature incidentally.  
Until then, grad school, anybody?